I am a product of a sub-par New Jersey education system. The New Jersey State Education system is in shambles, barely having enough money to keep teachers on the payroll and nowhere near enough money to adequately fund the extracurricular activities that are actually interesting children enough to go out and learn on their own. Most of my days of high school I slept through, my memories of Spanish class included a milk chug contest and a phone call resulting in a mad rush to steal the exam questions off the teacher’s desk. The good memories usually involve my friends, skipping school to go hang out at the mall once I had a driver’s license, or skipping class to work on computers inside of the school’s computer science lab. When it came to education I was able to perfect the art of bullshit, but I did not learn the skills necessary to get myself into a good college.
I am also lucky, because I knew at a very young age what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I have been writing software since before I remember, tinkering with web pages and writing scripts since well before high school. I was crimping network cable to construct a make shift LAN-party to scrimmage before Counter-Strike (and later, Day of Defeat) tournaments. My final year of high school I went into vocational school for computer science, spending most of the time writing code for my Half-Life modification and extending some Quake code to gain an illegal advantage over some of the other guys that were in the technology class with me. Those were some good memories. But now, eight years later, after spending six years working towards a bachelor’s degree I can look back and say that I wish the K-12 education system had their shit together. I would have spent much less time re-learning trigonometry, college algebra, physics and chemistry.
What is the point of this rather long anecdotal account of my education history? I read every day about how “Governor Christie is destroying the education system by slashing education funds,” and each day I laugh, because the education system was already destroyed long before Christie made the attempt to balance their budgets. Teachers are pissed off, parents are pissed off and their kids are sitting around oblivious to it all. So the school goes and blames the governor for their budget problems, goes and balks at the union cutting the newbie teachers that actually give a shit about the students they are teaching. I have worked with education professionals, met some amazing teachers, been taught by a few of them, but those are far and few between. The sad fact is the vast majority of teachers are collecting a pay check, tired of their job, but do not have any other career to fall back on.
Unfortunately teachers are amongst the lowest paid professionals when they should be on the opposite end of the spectrum. These are the people molding (or at least put in charge of) the workers, thinkers, tinkerers, great minds, of the future, and we pay them pennies? As I said earlier I believe that the whole education system in New Jersey (and from what I can tell, most of the United States) is broken. We attempt to teach the masses the same exact way, not focusing on the kids’ skills where they excel the most at. A student’s education should be well rounded, but if they are better at mathematics (or a field which involves mathematics) make sure to focus their plan on math.
For those that are not interested in mathematics, literature or the sciences, we have carpentry, automotive, and other mechanical trades that can easily be taught at a young age. One thing that I credit my high school for making available the superb-focused (and amazing instructors) of automotive, carpentry and beautician programs at the choice of the student as an elective. I was lucky that the computer repair and general information technology programs were budding at the time that I went through. But this is exactly my point – we need to go back to the times where we have targeted programs for the interests of students, including apprenticeships, and certifications that actually mean something in the work place. I did not need to go to college, I was more than ready to take a full-time job working as a programmer at the age of eighteen, but in my industry a bachelors degree is a litmus test.
New Jersey, please make a real attempt to clean up your education system, and stop placing your budgetary blames solely on the shoulders of a man just attempting to balance the books. Because the last time I checked not only are we in debt, but we have the highest property taxes, the most toll roads, in the nation. Where is all the money going?