Education
About a week ago, I was watching an HBO special on the educational system in a school of inner-city Baltimore. It captured my attention, because I had just returned from the Baltimore area a couple of days beforehand. I went to the city on a journey to Johns Hopkins University. When entering the address on my very handy GPS, I chose ‘shortest distance’ instead of ‘most use of freeways’ to get there. So as me and my dad entered the inner city, and grew nearer to my destination, the environment we were traveling through made me grow skeptical about my GPS’s abilities. We were passing through small, one lane streets which were flanked side to side with deteriorating apartments. Many doors were boarded, windows broken, and apartments tagged for demolitions. These scenes, mixed with the smells and sounds of a large city, gave me a cramped, almost depressing feeling. The liveliest building was a local grocery store, decorated heavily with worn tobacco and cigarette ads, covering the peeling paint that was coming off the building. Off to the side, a poor man was wheeling a cart with everything he owned in a black trash bag. As we passed by him driving, I looked at a man, but it was poverty that looked back.
And then we turned a corner, and another, went down a lane, and were greeted by the large green fields and grandiose entrance to Johns Hopkins University. The trees were tall and dense, the flowers blooming in the peak of spring, and the sounds seemed to have been left behind. But I asked myself, what had just happened?! I just drove down a road! And it seemed now that I had left and entered a whole different country.
That was what I remembered when I started watching the special on HBO. I remembered that clear separation. And as I kept watching, the statistics and the interviews kept stunning me. Less than half of the students graduated in four years. More than half of all the classrooms were ‘taught’ by substitute teachers. Only one student that year had achieved a score of more than 1000 on the SAT. It was then that I realized what I had seen on my trip to Johns Hopkins. I had seen the effects of the educated and the uneducated on the population. Physically, I had driven a mile to escape that part of Baltimore. But mentally, that place was an ocean away from the university. It was education that separated the two settings, and nothing more.
What went wrong in those streets? Why did the system of education begin to slow, and weaken? When did the schools begin to decay and learning come to a halt? They were interviewing an English teacher at the school on the show. He said that most of his class period had nothing to do with the subject, and there was no time to teach, because the students behaved so badly, and he had to spend his time with discipline instead of English. The teacher quit because he couldn’t take it anymore. And indeed, as our Declaration of Independence states, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
But we cannot allow this trend to ring true. Our country cannot stand idle to this issue. We must abolish this flawed system before we become accustomed to it. The lack of education must not be put aside, or ignored, or hidden under the bustling action of our cities. I’m not for the belief that the government should take control of the business of its citizens. The less control the government has on the things which the citizens themselves can resolve, the better. But in a situation like this, it is not a child’s fault where and under what situation he is born. Thus I believe that the government should, with respect to education, take a strong, aggressive stance in its actions. Of the specific approach to take to end this situation, I might remain unsure. But of the fact that something significant must be done by the government, I am positive it’s the right approach to take.