This video is an interesting project that asks students to sort of videotape and monologue their various experiences with school. The results were a compilation of student grievances and troubles with the modern educational system whether in high school or college. It serves as a reminder that the politics and polarizing issues of education are not just visible to teachers but students as well. Some comments that resonated with me include student perceptions of standardize testing, learning, and shifts in student lifestyle. Most significantly that students can recognize the disconnect between valuable learning and merely regurgitating irrelevant facts for a test or a grade. It is ultimately leading students to lose faith in the significance or value of most schooling. Furthermore, students today are more enveloped in digital multimedia than ever before. Students are using these various formats to participate in self learning yet this is not translating to the classroom scene. Finally it is very apparent in this video and in my own experience that students strive to have purpose. But what we're seeing on most educational platforms is that students' individual values are being marginalized. That is, many feel that they're just another number in the system; that the focus is more on "teaching to the test" and not enough on students as valuable members of the school and contributors to their own learning.
The end game here is that students learn to become activists in change. As one student writes in a notebook, "Life is a design, make it work". Hopefully this signifies a shift in the student narrative towards active engagement.
- "Most students in class guess what the teacher wants them to say"
- "A collection of unrelated facts and is the goal of education"
- Students spend more than 10,000 hours playing video games and up to 11 hours a day on multimedia.
- "I wasted all of that money on a degree I'm not going to even use"
- "We spend 12 years of our lives in school. We don't know anything else. School is all we know"
- "The student is taught that discovering knowledge if beyond the power of the student. It is in any case none of their business."
- "What if I don't know what I want to do yet?"
- "The idea of being yourself has no meaning to me anymore"
- Standardized Tests = Standardized Students
The end game here is that students learn to become activists in change. As one student writes in a notebook, "Life is a design, make it work". Hopefully this signifies a shift in the student narrative towards active engagement.