On the United States Education System & Education Reform

Sitting in the back row of Mrs. King’s seventh-grade classroom, I watch dust motes dance in afternoon sunlight that slants through tall windows. The kind of light that makes everything seem possible, even algebra. I’m fourteen years old, unaware that I’m witnessing something rare: a public school with resources, books that aren’t held together with duct tape, teachers who haven’t surrendered to the machinery of standardization. It won’t occur to me until much later, standing in college hallways listening to classmates describe their educational deserts, that I had stumbled into an oasis most American children never see. The weight of that disparity would settle on me like snow accumulating through a long winter, each story adding another layer until I could no longer ignore the landscape of educational inequity stretching across our country like fault lines in the American dream.

Exploring the advantages of education reform has become one of the most compelling thought exercises of my adult life. A puzzle that shifts its pieces every time I think I’ve found the pattern. As a child navigating the system, I rarely questioned its rhythms or recognized its grace notes. That’s remarkable, considering my school possessed instruments many others lacked entirely. The full orchestra of learning played around me while I daydreamed through the symphony, unconscious of the silence echoing through buildings across not-so-great distances where budgets had been cut to the bone and marrow.

Traveling through different states after college, that restless pursuit of understanding drives some of us like migrant birds following invisible currents. I began collecting fragments of conversation about public education. The sheer lack of faith people have toward a system everyone has passed through, somehow, somewhere, proved both illuminating and troubling. Strangers in coffee shops, colleagues in break rooms, parents at grocery stores: all speaking about education like a broken promise, a betrayal of something sacred we once believed in. It made me question not just the architecture of learning, but the philosophy buried beneath decades of policy papers and political rhetoric.

I have a traveler’s heart, and that restlessness has carried me through various landscapes of American education. Urban districts where teachers buy supplies with their grocery money, suburban schools that gleam like shopping malls, rural communities where one teacher manages multiple grades in a single room. Each place offered its own regional insights and local contradictions, creating a patchwork of perspectives that revealed our education system as tragically and needlessly broken. The break is both fascinating and devastating, like watching a master craftsman deliberately smash his finest work.

The United States education system has undergone countless adjustments since its inception, each reflecting the tremors of societal shifts, economic upheavals, and technological revolutions that periodically reshape our collective understanding of what it means to be human. Yet these changes rarely honor the intrinsic value of education itself, that ancient act of preparing and guiding young minds with mindful development and sensible direction. It raises the question that haunts every serious conversation about learning: “What do we believe the purpose of education truly is?” And why does the public system continue wrestling with reformists who are, essentially, asking us to remember what we once knew?

The roots of American education stretch back through colonial soil, where quality and subject matter varied like wildflowers in an untended field. Most schools emphasized religious instruction and basic literacy, enough to read Scripture and write letters home, enough to participate in the grand experiment of democracy. As the nation expanded westward like spilled ink across parchment, so did the hunger for more formalized structures of learning. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the common school movement, led by Horace Mann, a visionary who dreamed of free, universal education that would foster civic responsibility and weave the disparate threads of our society into something resembling coherence.

There’s something both magnificent and melancholy in realizing that the most notable development of our contemporary system is simply that it exists at all. Since the early 1800s, education has been woven into the fabric of American life, with private and charter schools emerging alongside public institutions like variations on a theme. The early system aligned with agricultural rhythms; most children left school after fifth or eighth grade to support families whose survival depended on every pair of hands. The Industrial Revolution shifted that trajectory, replacing muscle and creating space for more students to complete high school; however, the fundamental structure of learning remained as unchanged as the position of stars in the night sky.

Throughout the twentieth century, we continued teaching as we always had: rows of desks facing forward, bells marking the passage of time like a factory whistle, subjects compartmentalized as if knowledge naturally divided itself into neat categories. The federal government assumed a more active role after the Department of Education was established in 1979, centralizing policy and oversight with the confidence of those who believe complex problems yield to simple solutions. Public interest in education intensified, especially around the persistent disparities in quality and access that shadowed every reform effort, but the system responded with increasingly rigid, mechanized approaches. Standardization narrowed the landscape of learning, elevating some subjects while casting others into shadow.

A cultural shift began to challenge subjective experience, passionate self-expression, and personal growth as irrational luxuries we could no longer afford. Ironically, it was the rise of science fiction in the 1950s. Those dreams of gleaming futures populated by rational beings, alongside our response to Soviet scientific achievements, helped usher in a more structured, mechanized way of educating our children. One consequence manifested as an inflexible focus on STEM subjects and the rise of standardized testing, as if human learning could be measured like rainfall or factory output.

This transformation paved the way for what we now refer to as education reform. A movement of educators and parents advocating for the renewal of arts education as part of genuinely comprehensive learning. Education reformers pushed back against the one-size-fits-all model like protesters against an occupying army, calling for personalized, student-centered approaches that honored the wild diversity of human intelligence. They highlighted issues of equity, vocational access, the destructive overemphasis on grades, and the desperate need for teacher development. Their strategies included increased funding for underserved areas, professional training that treated teaching as the sacred work it is, and the incorporation of diverse perspectives to create more inclusive environments where every child might discover their own genius.

In the early years of American public education, the arts played a central role in the daily symphony of learning. Educators recognized the value of fostering creativity and critical thinking through artistic expression, often weaving together history, science, and creative endeavors like skilled weavers working at a complex loom. The notion that science and history offer superior education to the arts reveals itself as arbitrary when examined closely, a blueprint for producing aimless, limited standards that mistake information for wisdom.

What objective within the STEM curriculum proves more beneficial to our lives than the cultivation of artistic sensibility? If our goal is to produce empiricists and professors exclusively, I withdraw my objections and defer to the machinery of specialized training. However, that’s not the case: isn’t that so? This suggests we remain fundamentally confused about how human behavior, emotion, and intelligence develop and interweave with our nervous systems, shaping who we become individually and collectively. We are still learning what it means to be human, yet we teach as if the question were settled.

The decline of arts education doesn’t merely stifle innovation; it distorts how we process life itself, like a radio tuned slightly off-frequency so that beautiful music becomes static. Students without access to artistic expression miss opportunities to develop the full spectrum of their humanity. They forfeit the chance to live dynamic, textured lives where beauty and meaning emerge from the marriage of heart and mind. Studies consistently reveal correlations between arts education and academic achievement, improved problem-solving abilities, and enhanced cognitive development, though such research often feels like proving that flowers need sunlight.

When people explore their lives through inspired lenses, they learn history and science more thoroughly and with greater satisfaction. Knowledge becomes living tissue rather than dead information to be memorized and regurgitated. There’s something tragically absurd about dismissing self-expression and personal growth as meaningless platitudes while reducing our existence to replicable data and mechanical methods. As artificial intelligence evolves and human consciousness seemingly devolves, we risk losing our ability to recognize beauty, let alone create or express it.

Standardized learning represents a fundamentally substandard approach to education, just as standardized testing offers a substandard method of assessment. Yet general-purpose learning and testing have formed the bedrock of our education system since the mid-1800s, as unchanging as granite monuments in a cemetery. Personalized, student-centered learning surfaces regularly as an alternative, though it shouldn’t be mistaken for a cure-all. There are genuine benefits to partial universal curriculum-based learning: dormant knowledge, like the periodic table or systems of measurement, can become indispensable when woven together with other information, like individual notes combining to create music.

People aren’t simple mathematical equations, despite our persistent attempts to reduce them to manageable variables. Our emotions and intellect are knitting together with every other biological system within us, creating symphonies of complexity that defy easy categorization. Reducing human beings to predictable effects from specified causes is not absurd. It’s a form of violence against the mystery of consciousness itself. Historical events and universal concepts provide valuable foundations for understanding our present and shaping our future, but we must approach them with greater wisdom about when, how, and why we teach, recognizing that genuine learning depends on the discovery of personal passion.

Vocational programs should be available to all middle and high school students, not as consolation prizes for those deemed unfit for college, but as recognition that human fulfillment takes countless forms. There is no reason classes shouldn’t include food preparation, management principles, mechanics, electrical work, plumbing, business administration, dental hygiene, paralegal studies, carpentry, and dozens of other practical arts. High schools have become too focused on college preparation rather than life preparation, as if the two were mutually exclusive rather than complementary aspects of human development. We also desperately need in-school opportunities for social and emotional learning, which research consistently shows improves academic performance, emotional regulation, and long-term well-being; though again, this feels like proving that children need love to thrive.

The grading system was originally designed to establish baselines for retention, a practical tool for tracking student progress. However, grades have evolved into something far more sinister in our collective consciousness. The repercussions of grade-based learning often prove more harmful than beneficial, conditioning students to over-evaluate their mistakes and label them not just correct or incorrect, but good or bad. That binary thinking influences how we distinguish everything: our emotions, our decisions, and our fundamental sense of self-worth.

We shouldn’t be surveying our world through the restrictive lens of right and wrong, but through the broader perspective of impartial experience where mistakes become teachers rather than judges. Grades teach children to fear making errors, yet as adults, we’re constantly told that failure provides our best education. We spend the first eighteen years of life learning to fear mistakes, then spend the next sixty trying to unlearn that fear. It’s as if we’re treating human development like a game of Jenga, carefully removing supporting pieces until the whole structure becomes unstable.

The greatest obstacle to meaningful education reform often presents itself as a simple question: “How do we pay for it?” The suggestion that comprehensive education depends solely on increased taxpayer dollars reveals itself as both outrageous and intellectually dishonest. We don’t need to raise taxes; we need to reallocate existing funds with the same reliability we bring to military budgets and corporate subsidies. The money already exists; it’s merely been directed toward the wrong priorities.

The real question isn’t how we can afford comprehensive education, it’s how we can afford not to invest everything we have in the development of young minds. If we don’t commit wholly to education, there’s no point in investing in anything else. Otherwise, we’re funding our own obsolescence, building monuments to ignorance while the world transforms around us.

Schools struggling with reduced budgets are put in a needlessly desperate position, like artists forced to paint masterpieces with children’s watercolors. The United States spends exponentially more on defense than education, nearly three times more than the next country, fifteen times more than the one after that. Reallocating federal funds should be as straightforward as moving money from one pocket to another, yet we treat it as if we were attempting to reverse the rotation of the earth.

The Government Accountability Office has been unable to audit federal financial statements since 1997 due to serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense, the inability to account for intragovernmental activity, and fundamental weaknesses in preparing consolidated financial statements. Our unwillingness to reallocate funds validates the suspicion that somewhere between government indifference and our own complacency, we’re simply waiting to become obsolete.

At the peak of American cultural achievement, arts education was recognized as essential to human development. After decades of reduced arts programs, we’re experiencing the predictable consequences: social divisiveness, economic anxiety, and waves of mental instability that wash over our communities like recurring storms. The correlation isn’t coincidental. A society that stops teaching beauty stops recognizing it, stops creating it, stops being it.

As the United States education system stands at yet another crossroads—and we’ve been standing at crossroads for so long that the intersection has become our permanent address—the path forward reveals itself with such clarity that ignoring it feels like willful blindness. We have the responsibility to demand a comprehensive and innovative approach to learning that honors both the complexity of human intelligence and the diversity of ways it can flourish.

Reimagining public education requires restoring arts education to its rightful place, addressing the inequalities that shadow every classroom, and committing to the radical idea that children possess multiple forms of intelligence and creativity. Policy changes, thoughtful reallocation of funds, and genuine collaboration between educators, students, policymakers, and communities aren’t just essential—they’re inevitable if we want to survive as a society capable of wisdom.

Only then might we create an education system that doesn’t just prepare students for standardized tests, but for the beautiful, unpredictable challenge of being fully human in an uncertain world. Only then might we remember that education isn’t about filling empty vessels with information, but about kindling fires that will burn long after the final bell has rung, illuminating paths we haven’t yet learned to imagine.