It's Time for Transitional Education

The educational standards in the United States are deteriorating quickly, students from around the world disgrace the students from the United States in every scholastic competition. Students in the United States today mostly encounter only one type of teaching technique a traditional technique overrun with chalkboard lectures and unenthusiastic teachers. This uneventful classroom structure forces students to act like the receptacles Freire described in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." Now, students function as trashcans for a teacher's input. Children do not express or think for themselves anymore. Today's students only know how to act subservient to their teacher's will. Drastically separate stages compose a reality known as life. Thus, to produce an education beneficial for life the United States must educate its children with an array of techniques mirroring life's developmental stages. In the life of all schooled persons, a transition must occur from a traditionally focused education to a "de-centered" education to fully develop that student for life in the real world.

To fully understand the nature of traditional and de-centered educational techniques one must comprehend their structure and style. Simple, yet drastically different traits characterize traditional and de-centered educational techniques. Chalkboard lectures taken straight from the text prove to be a common trait of the traditional education. Many traditional teachers usually lack passion about their subjects. Teachers utilizing traditional techniques rarely incorporate visual media into their lectures. In a traditional classroom, stimuli such as pictures, maps, diagrams and videos never crucially affect the teacher's goals for the course. Thus a traditiona...

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...dent reaps from his education.

To better mold the view of education, a concerted effort should take place not to mirror one educational technique used in the world today. Instead, our educational leaders should compile facets of all of the educational techniques to once again make the United States an educated superpower. Once this transitional form of education takes hold in the country, students will no longer stand for being receptacles but will start to think on their own and argue with their teachers. Transitional education should not focus on the big life questions. Transitional education needs to focus on everyday problems and techniques used in manipulating those problems. Once this transitional educational system develops in this country, students will come out of institutions as smart people who are energized about the real world and its challenges.