Persuasive Essay On Education In Education

After 13 years of formal schooling, the average American high school graduate should have a good educational foundation and be ready to put what they have learned to use in college. Well, the fact is, their foundation may not as be as strong as it should be. The youth in the United States today is becoming less and less prepared for life after high school. Parents, as well as students, have taken notice of these defects and demand change. They criticize the system for teaching irrelevant information that students won’t always need upon graduating. In addition, more pressure is put on students to get good grades rather than to actually learn the material. Due to students being taught irrelevant information, getting low test scores, and having

To figure out the teaching and parenting patterns that great innovators have received, Wagner interviewed the innovators, their parents and their influential teachers and mentors. In his findings, there were five key reasons why America’s education system is stunting innovation. The first reason being, individual achievement is the focus in school. Schools today seem as if it is a competition because students are constantly trying to improve their GPA to be higher than their peers. Wagner doesn’t agree with how schools are doing this because he says “innovation is a team sport.” And “problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.” His second argument is that specialization is celebrated and rewarded. When talking to a director of talent at Google, the director told Wagner, “If there’s one thing that educators need to understand, it’s that you can neither understand nor solve problems within the context and bright lines of subject content. Learning to be an innovator is about learning to cross disciplinary boundaries and exploring problems and their solution from multiple perspectives.” Educational institutions also penalize mistakes. Wagner believes that innovation is grounded in taking risks and learning via trial and error. In school, if a student fails, it affects their grade, however, learning from mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. Wagner also believes that learning is profoundly passive. For the 12 to 16 years the students are in school, they learn to become better consumers, while innovative learning cultures would teach about creating instead. Lastly, extrinsic incentives drive learning. Young innovators are intrinsically motivated, not interested in grading scales and reward systems. Parents of innovators encouraged their children to play in more exploratory ways, and these children grow up