Today was the first day of student registration for Harvard's High School Studies Program. We had well over a hundred students coming in to take various classes, from quantum mechanics and geometry to digital art and American political parties.
It really is unfair how (at least in our country) some people are able have a great education while others within the same city are functionally illiterate. To elaborate, most people can read words like "hamburger" and "Wal-Mart" but many cannot understand an article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Our nation is the wealthiest in the world yet has a Gini coefficient comparable to Mexico's (The Gini coefficient is a measure of a country's income inequality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient). I genuinely wish for more college-educated Americans to go into changing our education system, making it more efficient and rigorous. It would be fantastic to have more programs like Teach For America to send our best and brightest to the people who need them the most. What we need right now is more people who are capable of critical thinking and generating innovative ideas in virtually every sphere of human intercourse (technology, academia, politics, religion, the arts, you name it).
How could we improve the American education system? I am guessing that raising teacher salaries would be a good start. Feel free to comment on any other suggestions or thoughts.
IMPORTANT: I would like to thank all of the board members who helped organize today's student registration, including Stephanie Bachar and also Michael Price for staying up so late to fix website bugs.
Thanks for thanking Mike! Also, interesting post.
ReplyDeleteI think that the education problem in our society is not one that has been caused by or can be fixed only with better teachers. A lot of it has to do with the fact that large segments of the population just don't care about education or the opportunities that education can potentially open for them. Many poor, uneducated people have never seen anyone from their community actually escape the cycle of poverty through education, so they don't believe that it is accessible to them. If you do end up doing Teach for America, I think you will have to get personally involved in the lives of your students and try to make them see why education is important. Being an effective teacher is also important, but I doubt your teaching methods would matter much to the students in the long run if they just didn't care.
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