The youth is only as valuable as the education they receive to continue the streak of a prosperous society. Society also benefits from a well-educated populace. One of the benefits comes from the idea that all the educated individuals get a say in things but how do we balance the voices when there seem to be so many conflicting viewpoints?

In an international community, governments push to have a very educated populace. The country’s citizens are best able to produce top tier works that will enhance their own standing in the world, but with an example such as the No Child Left Behind Act, bureaucratic disasters happen and it taught to test, hurt poorer districts, and ignored the gifted children who are the future. Ultimately, the act was one that could be expected when trying to manage the nation’s students from the hill.

Property taxes are the money that is used to pay for schooling. The parents paying said taxes also have kids in these schools and therefore deserve to have an active interest in what is being taught within that school. It was obviously wrong for Virginian politicians to say they don’t think parents should have a say but there was some truth to it.

Parents are not educators, experts on subjects, and with a whole mix of morals and ethics, who is to say which ones should be taught directly? Common Core shows that parents are largely opposed to that way of teaching, but when looked at on an objective level, it is considered to be a superior way of teaching conceptual skills.

Other issues have been brought up nationally such as sex ed, LGBTQ+ education, books being available to kids, and what “age appropriate” actually means. Too many mouths will give too many opinions.

We see a major disconnect between what exactly we want schools to be with regards to “the science.” The schools are more of a babysitter than educational institutions. If they weren’t so much a daycare, we would strongly consider things like later start times, redesigned modern curriculums, longer school years, etc etc.

Marcus Aurelius counted it as his greatest blessing in life that he was not sent to Rome's public school system. Public schooling often has a net negative effect on individuals.

• It represses individuality

• It instills deference to authority

• Often overachievers are stifled as staffing and focus go to the students most in need

• Collective punishment is common, though in every other walk of life it is viewed as unacceptable

• Teen suicide rates peak each year before school begins

There should be some form of universal education but included should be an educational safety net. But there is no reason for our current system. Your zip code determines your quality of education, and houses are expensive. Our system now would be like if SNAP could only be spent at the government-run grocery store in your town.

This causes poor outcomes.

• Innovation, to the extent that it happens, is always top-down. You don't have workers (teachers) starting their own school using ideas that they've found work- like in every other profession.

• Nepotism. Nepotism on school boards and in schools is widely known and practiced. Without competition, there isn't any incentive to hire good candidates as opposed to candidates you have connections to. Businesses that become too nepotistic fail. Schools often get more money because they're failing.

• Standardized testing. Without market forces there needs to be another metric for determining the success or failure of a school. This has become standardized testing, which shines some light on the schools by allowing comparisons, but creates a host of problems- not the least of which is schools teaching the test which isn't reflective of any real-world criteria for success.

The question I leave you all with is how do we balance this to find the revolution within schools we need to change them from being the same institutions they were hundreds of years ago? How do we manage to improve our education systems to flourish the same way society is flourishing?