The Ineffectiveness of American Education.
While every year more and more people are finishing school and moving on to higher institutions of learning and entering the work force, more and more of them are unprepared to take on the tasks at hand. Teachers in America are more interested in teaching out of the books instead of worrying about teaching things to their students that will better prepare them for real life out of school. Most of today's teachers are short-changing their students in the classroom all across the country. The ineffectiveness of American education is because teachers do not challenge their students, they do not have proper techniques for teaching, and they lack the suitable certification needed to successfully educate a classroom full of students.
Teachers in today's classrooms are not demanding enough of their students and, in turn, are making them less prepared to move on outside of the classroom. In a survey conducted of whether teenagers thought they were being challenged enough in school, three-fourths out of one thousand students surveyed said they were not being given enough schoolwork to really challenge them (Gross 10). Such information proves the point that students are not challenged enough by teachers. As a result of poor teaching, American students are falling behind the rest of the world in education. In international education competitions, American students perform near the bottom in science and mathematics. The best students we could send were not even close to being on par with the rest of the world (Gross 18-20). This is also apparent in Homer Hickam's novel, October Sky. While a few of the boys went on to college and into the military services, most of them were not even able to escape the town of Coalwood, West Virginia. The only way a student was able to get out of Coalwood was to hope for a scholarship for football or hope that their family had enough money to pay for a college education, which was not the case for most people.