Education Reform As I See It. This essay is about my views of education reform in America.

Education Reform As I See It

The easiest way to teach is: to hand a student a book, tell them to answer the questions and then test them on the text content. This "facilitation" is the way many teachers in the public education system teach. This method only reaches those who have good reading comprehension. Those who have other learning styles such as: auditory, visual, or kinesthetic are educationally neglected and thereby often fall through the cracks, destined to meander through their school years and life in mediocrity through no fault of their own. Because education is the springboard for the rest of our lives, it needs to be centered around the individual and their learning style rather than the teacher's preferred methods of teaching.

As a student, I had several of these facilitators, those who handed us the book and said "Go to it". Needless to say it becomes easy to find the answers to the questions in the text without actually reading and absorbing the material.

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English: Photo of Paulo Freire

Thus, the grades "earned" don't actually reflect the amount of learning but the ability to "regurgitate" information. Freire describes this system of learning as the "Banking Concept". "It turns [the students] into 'containers', into 'receptacles' to be filled by the teacher." (Freire, p. 349) The ideal education setting would be one where the students learned through not only reading, but through activities using all of the senses. Through this "combination learning style", students can learn through and develop their preferred learning style, increasing retention and can inspire a love of learning.

Granted, some things are best learned by rote memorization, like times tables. Since the ability to learn more complex math comes with being able to quickly retrieve basic concepts, things such as times tables must be committed to memory...