What is Wrong With the Education System

With a literacy rate of 99%, the United States’ education system might not appear to be broken from the outside. Yet, ask anyone living through it—or sending their children through it—and you’d be amazed at how many criticisms it receives.

Costs are increasing, but results remain static. Children are becoming more proficient at sending text messages than they are at world history.

In the end, the result is that compulsory education until the age of 18 is not helping children but robbing them of precious time during their formative years.

To truly understand what’s wrong with the education system, we need to examine the system itself. That’s why we’ll start at the beginning and look at how the United States chooses to educate its children—and hopefully learn enough lessons to suggest an alternative that could spark an intellectual revolution.

Problems Within the U.S. Education System

Like in many countries, the United States’ education system is compulsory—children are required by law to attend school. Enrollment stands at 81.5 million if you include primary (elementary) school, secondary (junior high and high school), and post-secondary (college) education.

Children are divided into “grades” based on their age—and, on rare occasions, their abilities. They are taught for approximately six or seven hours a day, with summers off (“summer vacation”), a privilege also enjoyed by teachers, who earn a salary comparable to someone who works 12-month years.

Schools run by federal, state, or local governments are called “public schools.” Any student can attend these schools, and the costs of tuition are handled by taxes. Private schools are also accepted, as long as they are accredited by the state.

This system may seem straightforward, but once you take a closer look, it becomes clear that the problems are deeply ingrained. Let’s explore these issues further.

Potential Problems with the Education System

While the aspirations of a public education system are noble, they are no more effective than many other options. The United States primarily runs its education system through government coercion, overseen by the federal Department of Education. This, in itself, is a problem. Let’s examine other issues:

Socialization

While socializing children with peers is important, the “grade” system is far from ideal. The way children interact with others in school is vastly different from post-school life. In the real world, people aren’t divided by age. Instead, they naturally form groups based on common interests and experiences. Children should be learning how to socialize in an environment that mirrors the one they will face in adulthood, not in an artificial, age-segregated setting.

Uniformity

The current system promotes one clear strategy: “one size fits all.” Children are grouped by age and taught the same subjects as everyone else. This system works to encourage basic literacy and math skills, but beyond that, uniformity falls short.
Children have different talents, inclinations, and ambitions. Uniform lessons stifle their inherent curiosity and delay the development of their skills until they reach post-secondary education, where they are free to choose their own field of study. Uniformity is the enemy of education.

Lack of Competition

In the outside world, businesses compete to attract customers by lowering prices and improving services. This principle of competition drives quality and efficiency.
However, the U.S. education system ignores this fundamental economic concept. Public schools receive their budgets from taxes and function with little accountability, other than school board elections. If schools were forced to compete for parents’ dollars, they would have to keep tuition affordable and quality high. Schools would compete to offer better teachers and better classes, rewarding excellence and pushing for improvement. But the U.S. education system, with its lack of competition, does not benefit from this incentive.

What Are the Solutions?

We’ve spent a lot of time criticizing the U.S. public education system, but what about offering some solutions?

The solutions are simple to understand, though difficult to implement.

Privatizing the school system would allow companies to offer more flexible, customized education options for children. If parents are unable to afford tuition, they could receive vouchers to choose a school that suits their child’s needs. This would put the power of accountability in the hands of parents rather than the government.

Private schools, in a competitive market, would reward the best teachers with higher pay—rather than relying on a chronological pay system, as is common in public schools today. This would motivate teachers to improve their skills, benefiting students in the process. Schools could advertise high test scores to attract more students, while schools that fail to deliver would lose customers.

The solutions are clear, but education in the United States is firmly entrenched in the hands of the government. The challenge lies in breaking free from outdated ideas. Privatization and less government intervention could be the best way to address the current educational crisis, and it could save everyone money in the long run.

The real problem in U.S. education is not the lack of solutions—but the unwillingness to implement them.