Education Review: Who's to Blame?

The high school where I teach recently went through a comprehensive review this past week. The review team would identify where improvements could be made and provide direction to assist us in our quest to improve the education that we provide to our community. As a first-year teacher, I've become accustomed to a near-continual state of assessment that surrounds me so I didn't really concern myself too much with the whole process.

The findings were nothing surprising: students 'appear' to demonstrate some disrespect towards teachers, academic performance could be improved, etc. The recommendation, though? In addition to the general 'do a better job' schtick, it seems as if the school will be adding an additional four instructional days to the upcoming school year. Wow. It's not really too unlike simply throwing more money at a problem to make it go away.

The big problem I have with this is that it reflects the continued knee-jerk response of society to look for the problem in 'the system.' What about the economy? Oh, the government should do more to fix it. And education? Well, obviously the teachers should be doing more to reach out to our students. In very few circles is it okay for me as a teacher to say that the big problem is that too many of my students are too lazy to actually be bothered to care about their own learning.

I've been eagerly reading America Alone by Mark Steyn (very interesting albeit a bit pragmatically bleak) and a frequent theme addressed in his work is the inability for too many in our 'modern' societies to wean themselves from the collective trough and hindering collectivist mentalities. It's one thing to identify with certain groups, whether it be your Canadian nationality, church, or bowling club. This constant big-picture denial of individual responsibility is going to get us into more trouble if we can't even admit that we screw up as people from time to time.