An Education Utopia

I want to preface this post with that, I typed this on my little Nexus 7 tablet. It took me about an hour (or as long as it did to get my tires rotated). After I had typed it, my hands felt like I had typed a small chapter books worth of information. Turns out, it was like three paragraphs. Thanks perspective. Anyway...

So my school district didn't have school today, since it was a grading day for teachers. This left me with very little to do,well plenty to do, just not the will to accomplish it. Anyway on my way home last night I stopped by an eatery I frequent from time to time. As I walked in the man who operates the restaurant asks me "why do I always come in so late?" I essentially told him I work in education and I work late nights. He starts off by telling me about this place where teachers are respected. He says they never cut education and teachers are always paid really well.

Where is this education utopia? Japan evidently.

But why is this? I wasn't too terribly shocked by this notion. What I find most shocking is that more places in the world aren't like Japan when it comes to education. It pretty much seems like the rest of the world follows Japans model of education (or whatever model that is) But in America where we have an inflated idea of our education system. Well some people do. Our American education system just kind of limps along picking up some band aids as it goes along. Sometimes instead of a fix, we get another shot in the leg (looking at you NCLB). But regardless, it hasn't degraded into anarchy yet.

I know education reform is always something to talk about. But I'm not going to pretend I have the answers. I'll leave that to the much more smarter people than I.  All I can say is looking at the world (which there are good examples and bad), the US education system needs a little help. I don't know what that is or what needs to happen. Certainly within Oregon we could use a boost. We often tout ourselves as being "great" educational wise. I think if anything, Oregon represents a lot of good ideas that have gone bad. 

I mean look at this: http://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2013/state_report_cards.html?intc=EW-QC13-EWH

Teaching as profession has a D. That's pretty sad. Now this isn't meant to start some kind of inner-state educational warfare, but I think these stats should be a wake up call. Our K-12 achievement is pretty abysmal. And our overall success is average...so basically, kids will either succeed or fail. Is this something we should be looking at?  One could make the argument that "we need an uneducated workforce for manual labor jobs", but those people are elitist dicks. But at a whole are these numbers we should be proud of? I don't think so, we should probably be looking at a lot of things and trying to fix stuff. 

I know this a fairly generic argument. Its like having a dart board with different issues and blindly throwing an argument dart and landing on education. I certainly don't have any say in what should happen. I know if my model of education was a reality people would probably hate it. Well maybe... I think one day I'll map our my perfect educational system, I mean its all just fantasy anyway.