What I'd like to say to the education world...

If there is one message I'd like to shout from the top of a mountain to every administrator, teacher's union, educator, and student in the world, it is this: stop standardizing.

I imagine that many people would assume that I am referring to standardized testing, but that is just one tiny component of what I see as a gradually centralizing behemoth of universal miseducation. I want the whole system to come crashing down. Be it Common Core, No Child Left Behind, the constant re-brandings of the ESEA, or the Department of Education itself, I want pedagogy to become local, personalized, and specialized.

I believe that while people are born with equal rights, we are born with drastically different abilities. Some students are good at math, others aren't. Some students care about their grammar, others don't. Some students can be still and attentive in 50-minute intervals from 8am-3pm five days a week for twelve years, others can't. Because of this, education should never attempt to create universal standards. Students should be treated differently, and should face teachers with different styles, demands, and curricula. The world has no standards, so it is silly to impose standards on the youth to prepare them for the world.

If I were in charge, some changes I would make in America are:

1. Auctioning off all public schools into private hands (and using the profits of these sales to pay off the debt)

2. Abolishing laws that require parents to send their children to school and scaling back child labor laws, so families can allow their children to develop skills and earn money if they feel it's more beneficial to their children than sitting in a classroom all day

3. Abolishing the Department of Education and returning total control of education to the states and localities

4. Removing the licensing and education degree requirements for perspective teachers in favor of expertise/experience in the subject the teacher desires to teach and life experience in general (additionally, I would do everything in my power to remove all hopes of job security from teachers to force them to stay on top of their game or risk getting canned)

5. Allowing teachers to use limitied corporal punishment if need be

6. Encouraging morals, ethics, and values to take primacy above more scholastic academic fields in school

Rant over.