Education: If We Insist on Pointing a Finger, Blame the Parents

I relatively recently finished my public school system education, so I feel as if I'm ripe to give a spoonful of insight into the student perspective on education. I'm going to do away with the flowery build up and get right into the thick of things. I went to a C average magnet school. I would say in over half of my classes a large portion of my peers would receive between a C and an F. But I didn't. Friends of mine who had a decent support system at home didn't. My point being, you can't blame teachers for a system that's broken much deeper.

We embrace scapegoats. If teachers are the issue we can ignore the growing problem of broken families and parents so self-consumed that their children have no guidance. It's so easy to assume that if a child fails a class, the teacher must not be teaching.

Teaching is a job. There is no prerequisite that states you must be a martyr, however that's exactly what our society expects. The vast majority of teachers went into the field because they wanted to make a difference. They want to make an impact on the lives of children and spread their love of education. Often they do sacrifice personally and professionally for their students. There certainly are no other incentives besides love and noble aspirations to teaching grade school. But there are only so many times you can bang your head against a wall before becoming disenchanted and jaded.

My generation has been brought up with the idea that we are individually special merely because we were born. Our parents preach it from birth as well as our teachers(incidentally, one of the first things I would change about the education system). This gives us absolutely no incentive to earn our importance. No one is special unless they work at it. With well over 6 billion people on our planet, chances are you're average at best. If we want to be something other than the mundane, we will need to get over our narcissism and work towards it starting at a much earlier age.

If we treat our teachers with the respect they deserve, naturally the poor ones will be weeded out and better one's will be introduced. If we keep abusing them and blaming them for poor student performance, there will be none left. My own thoughts of eventually teaching history are quickly evaporating as our government looks more and more towards privatizing education and punishing teachers for the problems derived at home. I am leery about entering a dying field that is utterly underfunded and under appreciated.