The educational system in the United States, and a great deal of other countries for that matter, are stripping away important elements of education. According to Sir Ken Robinson in "How Schools Stifle Creativity", he argues that everyone is born with natural talent, but that the education system is currently stifling that creativity and pointing the world toward imminent disaster. Sir Robinson uses the increased rate of teacher turnover as well as the dropout rate to prove that we, as a country, are losing students. Before government got involved in school curriculum and prior to all the standardize testing the United States had a much more successful graduation rate with students going on to college and earning useful degrees. The value of college degrees is quickly diminishing and teachers are just as concerned, but are too afraid to fight the machine that is creating the problems.
The author points to the education system sticking to linear, or one-dimensional, values that focus on standardize testing. Schools are no longer teaching to the student, they are teaching to test. This brings into play the commercialization of education and the amount of money that is being spent on the current standardized tests and teaching for these tests. During approximately the last 10 years the control of the United States educational system has changed. It started when education, and the needs of American youth, transferred from the principals, the school and their administration to the state and federal legislature. Individual schools no longer have control over what they teach their students because they do not want to lose state money attached to standards. Teachers can no longer alter their lesson plans. Instead, these schools are handed a curriculum that is created by a group of people who believe they know best. Sir Ken Robinson puts that into plain English in his article.
