Dear American Education System,
Although you may be pretty much necessary to succeed nowadays, you are far from perfect. There are many glaring problems with the way you are run that need to be reformed sooner rather than later.
Let’s start with your primary and secondary school flaws. Let’s look at two of your biggest complaints: Start times and homework. The times that you expect your students to be awake, alert, and ready to learn are seemingly absurd. You expect students to be in class by 7:00am, which means they must be out of bed by around 6:30am, the latest, to get to class. This results in excessive sleepiness and subsequently decreased grades. Plus, it’s been proven that if you started just one hour later, there would be an increase in attendance, alertness, and good grades.
Then we get to your homework issue. It has been said by many students that they have way too much homework. I remember the good old high school days of working for sometimes seven or eight hours a night just to get all of my work done. Multiply that by seven, and that totals from 49 to 56 hours of homework a week -- not even including weekends and time spent at my part-time job. I had little to no time for a social life back then. What’s even more of a problem is that studies show that the optimal amount of work for primary and secondary school students is just one to three hours a day -- but I know so many people who had way more than that to face every single day. All that did was increase stress and fear of failure. We stay up all night to do your work, and then you expect us to be alert at 7:00 in the morning, but that’s just not happening.
Then, there are the problems with your higher education -- if we can even afford to go, that is. In just over 30 years, college tuition has risen over 500 percent. When some universities can cost upwards of $40,000 in tuition alone, it’s easy to see why the rates of young adults attending college has dropped significantly over the past ten years. There has been a tremendous amount of loans, debt, and frustration from your institutions, but where does that money go? Certainly not to the professors. The price of college has increased at nearly twice the rate of inflation, but your professors have been given severely limited resources, wages, and job security. By 2011, 70 percent of educators were contingent faculty, and many of them needed to have other jobs to stay financially afloat. This leads to classes that do not fulfill the needs of students, and oftentimes those classes produce lower grades and less credible recommendations. Contingent faculty are not viewed as very credible sources for recommendations, and that makes it harder for students to get better jobs in the long run.
These complaints certainly aren’t all I have to say -- I could go on about the lack of dining options or the conditions of dorms, but I think I’ve said enough for now. It’s not that I’m saying every aspect of you is bad, but when there are so many things that are lacking, I think something needs to be done.
Hopefully our generation will be the one to make you change.
Until that day,
Jessica Campitiello
