After watching the video and reading the texts, one thing is abundantly clear to me: there must be a shift in the educational standards in the pursuit of the best education for our students. Within the first 60 seconds of the video, for instance, the narrator states that years ago a college degree was generally the best course of action for students as it was most likely to lead to employment. Now, a college degree, while still not a bad thing, is incredibly subjective, and much less sought after.
Throughout the rest of the video, the narrator covers topics like education being a money game, schools being organized like "factory lines", and even drugging our children through their educational experience.
Personally, I'm inclinded to agree with all of these claim. ADHD is skyrocketing at an alarming rate in schools K-12. According to studies conducted through the NIH, ADHD rates have risen from 6.1% to 10.2% from 1996 to 2016, just 20 years. There is speculation about why this is happening, but that's not the purpose of this post. With these numbers, more and more children are being prescribed medications such as adderall to "stop" their attention deficiencies. For some children this medication could be good for them, while for others it can be detrimental. The struggle that we're in is finding a proper way to teach kids who struggle with attention disorders WITHOUT having to medicate them.
In addition to this, schools are very much organized like factories. We have bells to signal when lunch is or when school is over, some schools have uniform requirements, and as a whole, school is taking away the imagination from our students.
There's a fine line between self expression and being inappropriate, and I think that's where a lot of schools today get messed up, because they can't see the difference. I've seen this first hand at my own schools growing up, kids not being allowed to wear certain things or act a certain way because it doesn't fit the narrative. I'm not talking about dressing inappropriately or cussing, I'm talking about, perhaps, cultural affects or trying to make light of certain lectures and teachings during class. Teachers often times, and those above them, will try to silence students who don't match the "norm", which could harm kids because now they have it in their heads that what they did was "wrong" even though it probably wasn't
At the end of the day, it's our job to look after our students and make sure that they're getting the best education possible while ALSO keeping their imaginations alive and well so that they can use them in the future to help them better succeed. It's not our job to make robots, it's our job to make success stories.
Here's a link to an article I found supporting the ADHD statistics previously mentioned:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9616454/#:~:text=The%20past%20couple%20of%20decades,the%20causes%20for%20this%20trend.
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