Are Public Schools Creating 'Standardized' Students?

           Having attended public school from kindergarten to tenth grade, I can say that I have first-hand knowledge of the public that public schools try to create. From my experience, public schools do fail to create a diverse environment for students to learn in. Although public schools do try to create a sense of diversity among the students, public schools actively combat diversity in academics through a stagnant curriculum called the common core.

            In The End of Education, Neil Postman states that “sameness is the enemy of vitality and creativity” (Postman 78). Sameness was certainly part of the curriculum in public school. In high school, teachers were forced to adopt a curriculum called the Common Core, which is a national curriculum determined to make sure students learn the exact same lesson as every other student. Every single Honors English two student read 1984 and Macbeth and did the same exact assignments to go along with each book. How can a school system create a diverse learning environment, and a diverse citizenry, when every student reads the same books and does the same assignments? At times, I felt as if school was trying to create identical students, or at least a public that could provide a wonderful analysis of 1984 and Macbeth, but no other books.

            In addition to teaching the same exact material down to every individual assignment, public schools often relied heavily on textbooks and textbook reading to teach courses. Neil Postman and I agree that textbooks are not the effective way to convey information to a student: “Textbooks, to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning” (Postman 116). Textbooks do not allow a student to question its contents, nor do they allow for active discussions about the subject matter. Textbooks simply present facts that must be memorized for quizzes and tests. In my tenth grade Biology class, I don’t remember my teacher once standing in front of the class, and discussing biology with us. Instead, we were given sections out of a collection of online videos to watch and answer questions on. Better yet, our homework was usually to read and take notes on a chapter of the textbook. Better still, the final exam was a standardized test made by the Maryland education system that tested the students on how well they memorized biology.

            Public schools create a learning environment that encourages sameness, and discourages diversity. Although, there programs in place to learn skills in diverse professions (everything from engineering to cosmetology) very few students were given the opportunity to pursue such diversity. However, more students need to be afforded the opportunity to pursue such interests in our public schools in order to create a diverse citizenry with many different educational backgrounds.

Work Cited

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New  York: Penguin, 2006. Print.