Week of 5/13 - Education Reform

For our third week we will be discussing Education Reform.

Our group resides in the United States, so our experiences are all influenced by the American educational system. For any international readers, I will try to briefly summarize how our system works. We go to school from we are around five to about eighteen, although the age varies between states. Unlike some other school systems, people do not go to a separate high school depending on the occupation they are looking into; everyone attends the same school and takes similar style of classes until college. After finishing school at 18, people can go to college if they wish, or enter the military or some sort of trade school or just enter the workforce.

Here, most of the thoughts behind education reform try and address two problems -  the idea that our primary and secondary education system is falling behind the rest of the world, especially in poor urban or rural areas and that the cost of college education is becoming unsustainable just as a college degree is becoming practically necessary to holding a good, high paying job.

I am interested in reading how our group's experiences with education have influenced how they think it could be better. I am looking forward to how many of our posts address other country's educational systems, ways reform is being tried here, or perhaps their own, untested hypothesizes on how we could better educate our futures. But as with all opinions on reform, perhaps some will address whether it is actually necessary, and how plausible it is to try such reform, and whether such broad institutional change would actually be possible, especially in a federalist country such as the United States.

See you all this Saturday, as I weigh in with my own opinion on the topic.