Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? As I walked into the gas station I couldn’t help but envy the cashier without even seeing who they were because they had a job that required zero mental capacity and required little to no thinking. I had just gotten off of work, where I was quite literally running a business, which was no easy task. It wasn’t until I laid eyes on who was ringing out my late night purchase did I immediately regret envying them. It was Jordan Davis, our graduating class’ valedictorian. I awkwardly set down my energy drink I planned on using to power through typing a paper on the counter and glanced around the deserted building avoiding eye contact. It had been recently known that Jordan had started to attend The Ohio State University for a double major in biology and psychology but had flunked out and moved back home after his girlfriend had recently become pregnant. The silence had an unusual tension to it; I had to break it with a half-hearted, “So, how are things?” His response caught me off guard, stating that he was actually happier home then when he was at college. Apparently the lack of thought required here appealed to him much more than the stress of studying to become a doctor and have a career. He then proceeded to tell me that he and his girlfriend were living with his parents while he attempted to save up enough for their own apartment but was saying he wasn’t quite sure how to go about getting one once he had enough saved up. I didn’t really have a whole lot to say to him and he claimed it was time for a smoke break, so I wished him luck and continued on my way out to my car and drive to my own apartment a few blocks down and think about topics for this upcoming paper. The whole exchange with Jordan had me thinking on how someone so smart and promising could just throw their future and dream of becoming a doctor down the drain and not care, but wasn’t even sure how to get an apartment to support his new family. This then actually led my thought process down a different path of education and how and what we are taught can affect our entire lives and leave us either prepared or completely unprepared for the real world. The school we came from boasted one of the highest graduation percentages in the state, and yet the more I thought about it, didn’t teach us anything truly useful except a handful of social skills. We had the usual classes plus a few “special” classes, such as Statistics, Economics, and Pop Culture, but nothing really that prepared you for the real world. We never learned how to fill out a résumé, balance a checkbook, nail a job interview, apply for a credit card or loan, or even cook a simple meal. None of those useful skills, instead you had to ask your parents, or worse yet, the internet. So I couldn’t completely blame Jordan for turning out the way he did, but rather the flawed education system that got him to where he was. Education itself is a very crucial and complex thing to try and understand. There are many things that could use fixing in the education system in place currently nationwide. Currently they have the “No Child Left Behind” system instilled, which essentially states that teachers and counselors have to do whatever they can to make sure that every student passes. What this means is that teachers have to design tests and lesson plans to the worst students in the class, leaving the brighter students bored and unchallenged all through school. When these students hit higher education or real life problems that requires studying and effort they won’t know what to with themselves or properly educate themselves, which was the case with Jordan. I could tell already the more I thought about this troubled system the more disappointed I became and how poor Jordan didn’t have a chance. Now the age old argument that every high school student has used is that what they are learning is irrelevant. While this is quite often quickly dismissed, it is actually a rational disagreement. How many of you can actually say that while you are doing something around the house you have had to use sin cos or tan to figure out how to cut a piece of wood, get the right amount of carpet, or anything really? Unless you plan on going into something that specifically involves trigonometry you will forget this information within years, sometimes even months. I agree that the basics of everything should be taught to a person not just to have them know it, but to see if it interests them. Now what I disagree with is expanding on those basics into impossibly complex mathematics that have no use even in the most complicated situations. It is perfect that we are teaching people Algebra, English, History, and Reading, but the problem lies that those are the four things we simply keep teaching children. Just variations of those four concepts. It’s a miracle that anyone can develop into a useful person in modern society just teaching them these four basic functions. We need a system that touches on the basics of everything ranging from solving for x, to how to sew a hole in a shirt, and if someone wants to learn more let them. Don’t force them to expand on a subject they truly despise and wouldn’t even consider having a career in. While it’s true not everyone will be able to have a career in a subject that interests them 100%, I can guarantee that nobody will accept a career of any sort if they hate the subject the career pivots on. Too many people are graduating high school with no plan or idea on what to do because they aren’t properly taught. How many kids are going to come fresh out of high school and need to know the chemical process of photosynthesis? Not too many. Now how many will need to know how to put down a down payment on either a car or house or apartment? Way more than the first one. Once Jordan’s girlfriend was pregnant all of his college plans were put on hold. His highly educated ways didn’t help him possess the common sense needed to protect himself and his dreams.
Society bases someone’s education and intelligence on fixed, standardized tests, which is morally wrong of us to do. We grow up being told everyone is unique and special; that no two people are the same, so why should we hold everyone to the unreal standards that are state mandated tests? My father is a teacher, and he agrees saying it is ridiculous because now teacher’s wages are dependent on standardized test scores. So if enough of his students do poorly on these tests his pay drops. The government’s rationale behind this is that it will encourage teachers to make sure every student knows the material required. In reality it forces the teachers to push simple memorization onto the students. No real learning is taking place, they are just memorizing material the state has deemed “important” only to forget it months later. It isn’t the information that is important in education, it’s how they arrive at the answer or the information. It’s not about how many watermelons Little Jonny has at the end, it’s how he ended up with that many watermelons that truly matters. All of these thoughts came to me well after my encounter with Jordan, yet I couldn’t quite shake the realizations I came to away from my mind. We all knew our education was faulty somewhere, our worldwide ranking has steadily been dropping since the 90’s. This problem isn’t just effecting education, but every aspect of American life. Unemployment is rising, partly due to the economic hardships we have faced, but also because we aren’t being taught in school how to get out of unemployment. We aren’t being taught how to apply for jobs, how to keep a job, or fill out a résumé. We aren’t being taught the skills we need that could be truly useful in life or the real world, only skills that benefit a hypothetical situation. Clearly this is a problem that will only worsen. Jordan was left defenseless against this new epidemic, along with thousands of other high school graduates every year. These are the people we expect to run a country, and they can barely run their own households.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to notify the generation before mine what kind of education we are receiving and explaining that while it might seem impressive on paper, in reality we are dooming ourselves to be dysfunctional in actual society and experiencing day to day life. To show that we aren’t learning what we need to learn to be able to truly do anything great in the future and that we can barely take care of ourselves as a generation.
Audience: Generations older than mine that can influence what becomes of our education system who are unaware of the current state of it specifically the older generations who consider theirs to be superior to the current one. This is a wake up call to anyone who can make a difference, maybe just point the problem out and make people aware.