Something I Feel Strongly About

Note: This is a part of the October Blogger Challenge

It's day 2 of the October blogging challenge and today's prompt is "Something You Feel Strongly About." This should be good. And while this might overlap with a later entry, I'm going to write about education.

 To me, education is super important. I believe that it is the responsibility of the parent to ensure that their child has a really good education. And by education, I don't just mean sending your child off to school everyday. It is your responsibility to make sure that your child is getting the education that he or she needs in order to make it in the world.

 In America, we seem to have this belief that the education system will properly prepare our kids for life. I do not believe that this is the case. I think it does a really good job of preparing the future doctors or architects or engineers, but it leaves out a lot of people. What about the artist or the entrepreneurs?

These people don't get a very good education in our current education system. The system may teach them Trig, but it doesn't teach them what they need to know to succeed.

 I imagine an education system we're all skills are taught. Not just the book skill. And well, we do have art classes and occasional leadership classes, this is not enough. This leaves kids unsure of what to do to succeed once they leave school. The college bound kids will go off to college, but the rest?

And even the college kids may end up floundering after college. This happened to me. While I was extremely good in school, I didn't know what to do when I got out. Yes, I could have gotten a really good job. In fact, I did. But I hated it. I wanted to make my own way in the world. I wanted to start my own thing. I wanted to work in a way that was flexible and independent. But my school did not prepare me for this. I had to invest in many more educational opportunities in order to learn the skills necessary to really make it in the entrepreneurial world.

What if this was taught to every kid in every school? The government has this No Child Left Behind policy, but it's not enough. In order to really make it No Child Left Behind, we have to fundamentally change the way we think about education.

Parents need to be involved. Education is not something that you can just send a child off to everyday and assume things are going well. And I'm not saying every parent does this. There are many wonderful parents out there that are super involved in their child's education. But this must be more universal. We must educate parents on their role in their child's education. Right now, it's up to the parent to do the research and not every parent will.

I am currently working on my own plan for what education should look like. It includes both the parent's education as well as the child's. And if I ever have kids of my own, I plan to educate them at home based on this system. My plan will not be the end of the road. But I hope it is a jumping off point for a new way to look at education. This is what I am truly passionate about.