Essay About Education In America

American Education Needs Reformation Education in America has the responsibility of preparing young men and women for taking on the real world with good tools, a great mindset, and mental level that all Americans have the right to obtain. The process of education, though, is hindered by technicalities and age segregation, and the education itself is flawed under the light that it fails to address real world experiences and critical thinking in the required curriculum to graduate. In addition to this, people are forced to go to these schools because of compulsory education laws, and while some are able to advance because of a natural ability to think critically, others just barely pass through and obtain nothing from this wasted time. Therefore, compulsory education laws are not the problem; education is. The first compulsory education law in the United States was enacted in 1852 by Massachusetts (Grocke 1). By 1918, all the other states had written their own form

James Baldwin, the writer of the famous “A Talk to Teachers,” said “The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself, whether there is a God in heaven or not” (1). It is important for a man to decide what he believes in, and this can only be accomplished through critical thinking. Horace Mann, who played a role in writing the first compulsory education laws, stated that “the number of improvers will increase as the intellectual constituency, if I may call it, increases” (3). America needs improvers, or servants, who will advance the U.S. regardless of directly received rewards. People such as these could find simple ways to change the world without putting extreme effort into such