School System fixes I would suggest:
Edit: Seeing posts below I'm realizing that globally we probably experience different mandatory classes. This is what it looked like for me in High School.
Grade 9: 2 Free, English, Math, Gym, Science, French, Geography
Grade 10: 3 Free, English, Math, Science, History, Career/Civics, Art Credit
Grade 11: 6 Free, English, Math
Grade 12: 7 Free, English
- Make more room for electives at the early Grades. I mean seriously, Grade 9 = 6 Mandatory, 2 Electives. High School is when you're supposed to start specializing and finding your click, not being ham-fisted with pointless information. Now, I'll note further below I start to suggest for a number of other mandatory classes, which would directly conflict with this point, but that leads me to my second point.
- Make Grade 13 open to all. I did not like at all how my old High School made Grade 13 something to "apply" to, where only the better off students would be accepted. If people need an extra year to dabble in courses to find themselves out then let them! Hell, in all likelihood the people who need the Grade 13 are probably those who are struggling in classes still looking for where they excel. You kill the entire point of a Grade 13 by denying those people a chance to get more educated. Or maybe make Grade 13 required, give people a little bit more time to self discover and grow up before being thrown into the adult world outright. Or if other Mandatory classes becomes a bit much, the extra year can serve as much needed time to make it so electives don't suffer as a result.
- Only Grade 9 English is mandatory. Seriously, Grade's 9-12 are literal duplicates, you take one you take them all.
- Not get all obsessive over teaching Cursive Writing. This was actually something my 5th Grade teacher broke the rules on, he recognized I wasn't good at doing cursive, but I was great at doing work on a computer. So he decided to not worry about teaching me cursive writing, and let me mail in my assignments. His reasoning being that friends he had (including professions like doctors) couldn't write for crap either, but it didn't matter cause they could type everything. And let's be honest, technology is becoming more and more dominant every day.
- No Mandatory Secondary Language. Yes I know a decent amount of people speak it, but majority of the time (at least here in Canada) French communities and English communities are rather separated save for one or two provinces. You do not need to make students suffer 1000's of hours of poor grades to learn a language that they will never use with the people they interact with.
- Likewise only make Grade 9 Math mandatory. Other forms may have some more uses depending on their field, but many people get by without out. Some individuals benefiting doesn't warrant forcing it on the majority that it doesn't benefit.
- Math Teachers need to be more open and honest about what the math leads to in the real world. My teacher refused to answer this question taking a stance of "Just do your work, it's Math so it's useful". Not only killing any motivation with the current math, but effectively driving students away from math electives they might have actually wanted to take if they knew the uses of it.
- No Mandatory Art Classes. Like Brovo said, not everyone is a creative arts person, not everyone cares for it, and it's not relevant for a ton of fields out there. And being held back because you can't draw or sing well enough is stupid.
- Replace Mandatory Gym with Sex-Ed. Seriously, Gym class was pointless and the fact they only put two weeks of it aside for sex ed is terrible.
- Sex-Ed also should try to address the joys of sex. The majority of time people have safe sex they are doing it for fun, enjoyment and to share passion. The fact we ignore this completely when teaching kids about sex is rather concerning.
- Science needs less table of elements memorization and more time focused on stuff like Evolution. Those units got skimmed by way too much, and if you're going into Science you should (in my mind) be learning about your biological history and the world around us. Not the exact symbols and electrons that each element possess.
- History classes need to be more on actual History, and not stuff like "Back in the day people had Beaver Hats", "One day someone made Bear Stew... It made people sick", "This was the women basketball team 100 years ago". In what situation is any of that information useful? I mean I know I live in Canada and our history is limited but come on!
- Mandatory Religion course, and no I don't mean on a specific Religion. I mean about all religions, may you agree with religion or not (like myself) it has played a huge role in human history, culture and society. We're still surrounded by it, and having a basic understanding of it could do wonders. Plus it allows people to not simply be limited by whatever their Parents tell them behind closed doors.
- Like wise, Mandatory Mental Illness course, several most likely. Mental Illness is everywhere, it's becoming more common to find someone with a mental illness now than without one. We need to get people aware and educated on these matters.
- While we're at it let's throw in something about things like LGBT, world cultures etc. as well. Humans are a social species, you will interact with others all the time in your working life. Being armed with a better understanding of another will only improve co-operation, performance and the morale of all parties. Effectively, we need a Social Studies curriculum.
- Better education on our laws. Seriously, not knowing our laws can be a very bad thing. Canada does fare a bit better here thankfully, but at least where I lived they focused more on what political parties there were, and how a court meeting operated than anything else. It was definitely lacking in teaching people their fundamental rights, laws that protect them etc.
- Special support/education needs to be more accepted. School's one size fit's all philosophy does no favors, it screws over a ton of children, but those with special needs especially hard. So when a documented and proven therapy technique comes up and offers to help with the school, to work with the staff to make the students learning the best possible? The Schools should be welcoming new methods of teaching with open arms, not dragging their feet in because it's something different.
- Not being as controlling over the students there. The point of High School is to prepare people for the working world or for college/university. We aren't doing that by hounding them for the smallest of things such as getting up to use the washroom without asking. If we want to prepare the students to be adults, we need to treat them as adults, not children that need to have their hand held with everything and under constant surveillance.
- Extra Curricular funding can't be so focused/specialized. In my school the majority of cash was thrown at the Music Clubs, with the majority of leftovers given to the Sport Kids. Which basically meant if you didn't want to sing or throw a ball there was no activities for you to get involved in. There needs to be more even funding in more fields, so more students are involves, get motivated to learn more, get exposed to more things etc.
- Mandatory Parenting Class, this one is honestly more iffy with me. But there are enough people to run into parenting recklessly like it's some sort of game that there should be some class to slap the realism of child raising into them ahead of time. If nothing else this helps act as quality assurance that the following generation will fare better.
- IEPs for everyone. This one's more of a giant overhaul, but we need to get out of the mentality that an IEP is for the odd individual. Everyone learns differently, everyone flourishes under different kinds of assistance, different teaching styles etc. If we learn to simply help every student get in the best situation for them to succeed, rather than reserving it for a select few (which also paints them to be seen as stupid, harassed, criticized etc.) everyone will fair better, both academically and socially.
- Set Camera's around the school. All too often does a child get beat up, bullied etc on campus but the school does nothing about it because no teacher was there to witness it. Set up cameras, have it so when this stuff happens there's video proof of it. Plus it can help catch bullies where the victim might decided to stay quiet about it out of either pride or fear of being a rat.
- After School Childcare should be an offered and available thing. Just like mentioned before by Jorick with school acting like a daycare, but remember that Parents often don't work the hours that school is open for. They may very well need different hours for their kids to be looked after on. Now, I'm not saying this child care is strictly stick them in a room and play. Make learning part of it, homework aid programs, tutoring services, time to get counselling etc. Treat it a lot like a Study Time class + Optional extra classes if teachers are willing to provide. That can do wonders for both looking after children for parents, and improving the value of their education. Also remember that normal extra-circulars would also still be a thing if the student would rather take part in those instead.
- Better Parent-Teacher interaction. Granted this relies way too much on competent and caring parents, but assuming that a child's parents are competent and caring, there should be easy ways for the parents to talk with the teacher. Parents get a better understanding of academic life, Teacher get's a better understanding of the home life, everyone wins.
- Pay Teachers more, these are literally the people who are guiding and training our future generations. They are the people responsible for our entire future work force. The fact we pay them minimal amounts for this is atrocious. And the fact we give them minimal respect for this is also rather barbaric.
That's all I can think of for now off the top of my head.
Might think of more tomorrow.
- Get rid of that stupid "I pull my student from this unit" thing for Parents when it's Sex Ed. I'm sorry, but your lack of ability to teach your kids about this and make them comfortable about it is not a license to stop the school from doing so.
- Teach kids about life skills such as paying taxes. I had a class that tried to do this, but got too focused on teaching people how to do proper interviews (which in itself was rushed) to focus on time on stuff like taxes. (Credit to ElBell to pointing this out).
- Better aid/assitance on finding post-secondary education programs and schools (Also Credit to ElBell for pointing this out).
- They need to be more able to let children experience failure without it having academic penalty. A major part of learning is messing up and starting up again, Schools at the moment do the total opposite of that by punishing every failure and making people afraid to try anything potentially risky.
