My background: Parent of two, ages 22 and 27. Both kids went successfully through the public school setting and graduated from HS with honors. 22 year old just graduated from a Jesuit university, after transferring from a private college on the East coast, with great honors and what I feel is a superb education. 27 dismissed college because he found HS too easy to excel in w/out challenge. 27 is now going through an apprenticeship electrician program so is back in a college setting.
I attended public schools, graduating from HS with honors. I graduated with a BA in Education from a state university with honors and earned my Masters from the same university, again with honors, and in Education.
I taught in the public schools for 15 years in grades 2-6 with many combinations of mixed age students and same age/grade students. Then I taught at the university I graduated from in the Teacher Education program. I left that after 5 years.
So now onto my answer: Primarily, as teachers and as public schools as a whole, we tend to dumb down the curriculum to keep test scores high enough. We underfund the schools and allow our "average" and "above average" students slide through w/out notice. Problems get attention and kids who are not causing or displaying problems or difficutlies are patted on the head and told to carry on.
So yes, our current system of American education is definitely affecting the intellectual development of its students. We teach and ask for regurgitation for test putposes. We teach so that we can look good as teachers when our students our tested. We teach our students how to take tests. We do not teach our students how to LEARN. We have robbed kids of their time to be creative, to challenge the status quo, to involve themselves in their own decision making about their education. Instead, we mold them to fit what the testing system expects them to be. If my children were young now, I would have great reservations sending them into the schools. As it was, when they were in school, my husband and I were very involved parents (and educators ourselves) and watched for problems and supported the teachers and students. Now, even with that involvement, I don't believe our kids would get the quality of education they were able to get years earlier. As a supervisor of student teachers, just ready to graduate and become teachers themselves, I leave almost every school, every classroom, every staff room, with a feeling of grave disappointment and fear....fear that teaching may be happening, but learning certainly isn't. Teaching students how to learn for themselves is definitely not happening and I watch student after student filling out worksheets, having their deskmate grade it, writing in journals intended to keep them quiet and not to encourage writing, and teachers grading worksheet after worksheet, with their standards lowering as their expectations are not met.
How can we possible expect our young people to engage in the real world, to be "agents of change" and to challenge when we are so busy testing them and holding them to a standard that is not going to help them become creative and self learners. I have a granddaughter who is 5 years old and worry about her future in school. As a college instructor I thought I was in a position to affect some change by forcing my students to challenge their own students to think, to discover and to create their own development in the intellectual world. I did have an impact and my students were generally extremely thrilled to have an instructor who had the enthusiasm to want and expect change and the great thinking and learning that can come from that. Unfortunately, when these students filled with hope would take on their own teaching position, they were forced into the model of the teaching staff and became mollified too easily into believing that this way just might work! Within a year, many of these teachers would return to me with a real heaviness in their heart. They knew they were not producing learners, but were merely keeping the proverbial boat from rocking. So the next step, as I see it in my future role, is to give those students more information, more confidence, more evidence based research to fall back on as they try to affect change. Perhaps with this, they will feel they have the right to speak up, to insist on change, to challenge their peers by using the research based information showing what we need to do to create thinkers. I continue to hope and will try not to lose hope. Get our young people to read, read everything, experience things that are out of their comfort zone, challenge them to find something they can involve themselves in to help other people, challenge them to ask if what their books are teaching is something they need to know, and give them the credit they deserve when that boat gets rocked and even a small change occurs. Reward the thinkers and learners with chances to do more, do go farther, to design their own intellectual future.
Long winded, sorry. Passion is something I am not short of and something our teachers need, to allow them to get mad, stay mad until something is done, and to see when they are getting shortchanged and then get mad about that! Let's look at intellectual development, not test scores. All test scores show are....mustn't get started on that!
Thank you for reading and if you made it this far, I may be encouraged to write again if encouraged:-)
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