Do you remember what it was like in high school? For some of us, the experience was a wonderful time, and many even claim high school as the best years of their lives. For others, and in my experience the majority of the people I’ve talked to, find the whole era less than enthralling, to say the least. Intermediate school, as has been shown by a number of experts in several different publications, and in my own personal experience, I agree, it is probably the most awkward and difficult time of adolescence. But why? What goes so wrong? More and more children are being diagnosed with ADD, and ADHD than ever before. While in other writing I will attempt to go into the explanation of why Attention Deficit Disorder is in fact, not a disorder, I will here simply discuss the ways in which the entire public education system can better cater to different learning styles, improve upon their weak points, and overall improve the entire educational experience.

Public education, at least in the United States, has been fundamentally the same for over 100 years, consisting of a repetitive process of filling out papers in black and white, falling asleep during teachers’ lectures, hoping and praying you’re a morning person so you can sleep at night and awake at the deathly hour schools commonly demand each morning, and so much more that just simply is not necessary. And what’s the worse, the problems are only amplified by a changing global culture of parents who continue to be more and more busy, leaving even more of the education to a politically driven school board whose soul actions depend upon bond dollars, tax money, and the decisions of local and federal politicians.

Certainly something is wrong with this picture, but what can be done? What can we do with the parents away being so busy?

Well, my life is a chaotic mess of being busy myself, but what I can do at least is give suggestions to how the entire system can be improved. And to many people’s dismay, it will in fact likely require some extra money be put into the public system, but on the upside it also demands a model that takes away the system being put into the hands of the politicians. Ideally, it would help if education were more of an industry, and in present time the entire community of colleges and universities is offering a model that is a bit closer to this, more resembling that of the entertainment industry.

The problem there, though, is that almost like the oil companies who supply us gasoline – they all unite and synchronize with what the others are doing. If one of them will be overly strict, so will the other. If one of them does things the incorrect way, their mere reputation will lead the other schools to follow. If Yale or Harvard does it, then it MUST be right. Someone needs to come along and produce a successful campus that defies these traditional methods and succeeds with the new paradigms that exist for learning. Someone out there needs to take the chance. But what school will be the first to step up to the challenge?

The Importance of an ‘Industrial’ Model for Education

At some point it is critical for us to move on past the regular political model for public education. With the fact that knowledge is power, you would like to think that there would be more private schools already competing for students and graduates, but the simple fact is that there are not that many of them out there, and the ones that do exist, while outputting more impressive results than that of most community or public schools, still do not utilize contemporary methods, and rather than adapting to the students’ needs they often do nothing more but place pressure on students for the students to adapt to their needs.

Why should the local, state, and federal governments be deciding what is best for public education? Why should the public not have complete and 100% say in the matter in a country that is supposedly democratic? Perhaps part of the problem is that a great majority of the population is uneducated about education. If the public majority does not know that better methods of education and an improved model of education itself exist, how can we expect them to act to change it? But then there comes the question – even if they did know, would they act on it? We will explore this question elsewhere.

Imagine an educational system that did not revolve around politicians, but rather around a competitive industry filled with all the same technology as Hollywood and/or the gaming industry, loaded with all of the experts of engineering and the different fields or areas of research and development.

Engaging Active Media With Video, Audio, and Interactivity

A school that has much of its content on video, audio, and in an interactive format will easily win out with its students for both the enjoyment of learning as well as the rate and depth of understanding in learning than a school that relies completely on lecture and tests. Lectures are going to be more ineffective than already pre-made presentations because by nature, freelance speaking is more flawed. Any piece of prerecorded material can be polished more than almost any speech that is rehearsed again and again.

Though often times, video content or films are not integrated in a classroom environment in the right manner. Too often teachers will sit back in their chairs themselves and let the movie take care of the class by itself. This is what high school kids are exposed to, and it causes the entire point of whatever the film was, no matter how boring or fascinating the film may have been, there ends up being a few kids who have fallen asleep by the end.

Video content is used best when it’s combined with a vocal narrative, and audio is used best when it is used on student’s own time or in the case of music can be used as ambience during an educational presentation. Interactivity is best used in games, incentive for different areas of classroom participation, but ideally, the best form of interactivity is building a competitive system in which students come up with a mass of ideas of their own in order to aid a particular topic.

Real life career work should not emphasize paper work, it should emphasize problem solving skills and improvement. The term ‘critical thinking skills’ needs to be vastly overturned, as schools today are not teaching ‘critical thinking skills’ with word problems that introduce us how to figure out how many of a certain color of socks are in Johnny’s drawer.

And of course, there is no doubt that the introduction of more technology would mean the spending of more money. Yes, yes, that’s always a big concern, and then there’s the fear that is paired with the concept of spending money with the concept that it is money wasted. And this is not an unfounded fear, it happens every day, all the time. Schools everywhere are not only making mistakes with how they spend their district money, there is also the painful fact that they usually know when they’re spending their money wrongly, and since no one is able to step up out of their busy lives(or not enough people), then the money keeps going down the drain.

More Emphasis on Social Development

The entire environment of a classroom is often one where one can get by simply by doing his or her own work, minding his or her own business, and whether or not the others around one succeed or not is independent of one’s own individual success. But is it really such a proper thing to do that the entire system should operate under this principle of apathy? I think not. The combined and collective efforts of group teams should be the functioning power force behind class room environments. While it has been said that the same concept of the 80/20 marketing rule might apply to classrooms, where 80% of the work is done by only a proportional 20% of the students, it is possible for everything to change in a group setting, and this is something that the group should strive for.

Overall, the entire social aspect of education is being ignored. How many kids are learning about the effects of language on the mind? What kind of benefits could we see happening from technologies and fields of knowledge like Neuro-Linguistic Programming(NLP)?

Deeper Support for Alternative Learning Styles

We must see an improvement in the support for different learning styles. While some argue that IQ, or intelligence quotient, can determine one’s ability, this entire hypothesis has already been disproven by numerous thinkers. Included in this list of thinkers is Howard Gardner, a psychologist who created the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. In his book, Intelligence Reframed, as well as other books, Gardner outlines the theoretical existence of various different intelligences that are not measured by that of a standard IQ test. The standard intelligences are tailored to more left brain functions of mathematics, logical thinking, and so on, where other intelligences could just as easily exist, like existential intelligence, social intelligence, and more. If other intelligences do in fact exist, then are the schools catering to those other intelligences?

It’s already been proven without a doubt that people learn dominantly through different ways, much of them dependent on that of the senses. Kinesthetic, or touch, auditory, or sound, visual, or sight, and combinations of those elements.

These are just a few ways that the entire educational experience could be vastly improved.