High School Drop Outs

Peter Cookson Jr. wrote an article called, “What Would Socrates Say?” explaining about todays schools and how disfunctual the school systems are these days. I picked this quote to get into the depth about it, “Current high school dropout rates clearly indicate that our standardized testing regime and out dated curriculums are wasting the potential of our youth.”

I believe this quote is saying that our schools are outdated and out of the technology loop and they need to be updated and changed to become more modernized to the technology of today. It needs to interact more and better to keep a student hooked into the learning. We need to start thinking like Socrates, where he thought a classroom was wherever he and his students can find themselves. We need to bring back the students and have them come forth and want to learn again. And how the way things are going, isn’t showing that we want for that to happen. The only way to progress is to move forward and excel with today’s technology. In Wesch’s video, “A Vision of Students Today” explains that when someone is in college they spend 26.5 hours a day on work, school, sleeping, and eating. When they actually only have 24 hours to do so. So basically the school system now is stressing out and freaking out the students. Making them spend hundreds of dollars a year on books they won’t even open. This is causing students to drop out, there is too much pressure and it’s causing them to fold underneath it. For others it may be that they have 100+ classmates in the room and a teacher that lectures all day and will never learn your name. We already lost the one on one interaction with the students. And now we are losing them completely. We need to embrace the future and evolve to today’s technology.

Finding the connection between these two texts was pretty simple, they both are stating that today’s classroom isn’t helping the students learn, in some cases, its making it worse. Both of them agree something should be done to fix this problem. And Cookson believes that if we have this web based learning center where you interact with the teacher online and learn courses online, might be a new type of schooling that has much been needed. I believe that this maybe something that should be done. Right now, the school system is outdated, and can’t really interact with the students anymore. We need to move forward with today’s systems to make it so we are able to keep students hooked and wanting to come and learn. I believe we need to take out the 7am to 3 pm class schedule and have the student learn with the technology today, maybe something like a different subject day by day. By having something like that would not cause the student to stress with all the different subjects they have to learn at once and cram it all in. Most likely losing the knowledge they just learned. And by having letting it have a subject each day would cause less cramming and probably less stress. Which would be beneficial towards everyone.

by jeremy abendhoff