Teaching Teens: The SAT's - A Fair Fight?: Part II
By Mimi Rothschild
If you have excelled in some type of sports activity, and you are chosen to be on your college's team, you will get a free ride throughout college. All of that is contingent on the grounds the student achieves a substandard GPA. Here I see a related issue with today's higher education debasing itself. We are taught as young children, "why worry about your grades, when you can get through life with sports." This is where you can see college and sport's apparent misconception/corruption.
Should I have to point out that there have been many scandals exposed where top name colleges pay students exorbitant amounts of money or possessions to sway students to play for their colleges? I'm sure the coaches really had their eye on those student's minds. Do these students deserve to attend college, aside from their fellow "mediocre" classmates? No.
Webster's Dictionary defines a "student" as an "an attentive and systematic observer." Many say a student can be only as good as his teacher, but that can only be true to some extent. The student must take the initiative to want to learn and be "attentive" as explained in Webster's. Many students will not see the inherent effects of poor educational habits. These students will fail out their first year from a combination of drunken college parties, TV, and computer games/internet services just to name a few. The stereotypical movies we see depicting college life, and our real-life peers don't help us much at all. Too many colleges are seen as a party rather than a learning environment.
It is from my experience moving from state to state and other countries that many high school instructors fail to accomplish their task in preparing today's young adults for college. In this instance, the system has already been debased before higher education comes into play. Many of my high school teachers did not incite a positive image of wanting to learn more of the subject they were teaching. Some students would simply lose interest, daydream or sleep.
There was a difference in military operated schools verses civilian. There are many exceptions, good and bad varying from each institution. In military run schools, the teachers had a small advantage with behavior. The military children were more behaved than civilian students. This behavior was coming from the effect of a stricter child rearing method. The teachers were given a calm environment, free from common complications, such as misbehaving or violent children; thus resulting in a more efficient learning environment.
With all of these problems affecting the structure of college, no wonder this question is being asked. It's time to see past the illusion that there are not really any mediocre students, but a mediocre system (SATs) scrutinizing them.
In conclusion, American higher education has already been debased by its poor base structure. The United States scores lower than many of our foreign counterparts. Maybe its time we rethink and restructure the methods used to teach and scale a student in today's education system.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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