What's Wrong with the Academic System?

Although I am gainfully self-employed and have enjoyed my life after college, it still bums me out sometimes that school was such a difficult road to travel when I was young.  Even though everyone goes through it and most people probably have the same problems, it puzzles me why some simple things aren't fixed about the "academic system."  I think that teachers and administrators have unreasonable expectations of kids, and there are some simple things that just need to change so that more kids have a chance to succeed in life.

The first thing is the practice of having an overabundance of work and not enough demonstration of concepts.  Many types of lessons in school will show you a simple example of something, and then have twenty or thirty exercises which run the gamut from the very simple to the very complex.  When kids try to do these exercises without seeing more examples of how things are to be done, it can be a very daunting task.  Many exercises can have wrinkles to them that a kid just can't figure out, and overwhelming kids with work without having more examples to study will only cause them to feel like they can't accomplish anything, and that will lead to burnout somewhere along the 17 years of school that someone needs to go through.  Then that will lead to a downward spiral and a very bleak future.

The next thing that I noticed happening a lot in school is that there is an overemphasis on expecting a student to deduce information from a large body of text, often without that concept being directly stated.  I recall a reading selection called "The Gift Of Going Without."  I was assigned this selection when I was only ten years old, and when asked what this "gift" was, I had no idea.  It turns out that the use of the word "gift" is a figurative one that the reader has to figure out through inference, and I didn't get introduced to the concept of inference until 2 years later. It isn't until one would have heard someone make a reference such as "Back in my day, I had to trudge 5 miles in the snow to get to school every morning, as we didn't have a bus to take us there" that it may be possible to infer what this "gift" is, namely that you gain an appreciation and understanding of life before the evolution of modern conveniences.  But how can a 10-year-old figure that out, and what benefit does a ten-year-old gain by just being asked the question and not being taught the concept directly?  There were many such reading selections with inferences that went over my head, and I felt like it was pointless to belabor these selections without having the inferred concepts explained to me directly so that I would actually learn something.

Finally, there were some lessons that had ambiguous language that made them difficult to understand.  There was a lesson on prime numbers that sticks out in my mind.  It says that if you have a number of tiles, you can "make only one rectangle" if the number is prime, and you can "make more than one rectangle" if the number is not prime.  What I didn't get is whether that meant splitting the tiles into "rectangular" groups, or if it meant that you would try to make a rectangle out of all the tiles in more than one way.  It turns out that the math book meant the latter, and not the former, but again, how can an 8-year-old figure that out?

So, if school were done in such a way as to teach more by example and not turn kids loose to do work too soon, not leave one's understanding of a reading selection or lesson to chance, and be more precise in how explanations are phrased, maybe kids would grow up smarter, and we wouldn't have so many of them forced to take low-wage jobs, end up homeless, or go to prison.  Those are crisis situations that are all too common in this country, and it all starts with the "academic system" and its many flaws.