Revolutionary Ideas for American Education

1. Get rid of that smell in the hallways. You know the smell I mean? That one. Get rid of it.

2. Spend less time test-taking, more time making things. With fewer required standardized tests, students could focus more on the process of creating things: a book talk, an persuasive video, a feat of engineering, etc. I hated projects in school, mostly because they were such afterthoughts to the tests that it felt like I wasn't learning anything new. Making things builds skills. Make more things.

3. Start later. 7AM is a bad hour to make teenagers do calculus. Change the schedules.

4. Let's all stop being jerks to each other. If a teacher is mean to a student asking for help, that kid's not going to ask another teacher for help, either. It ruins the whole thing. If a students is a jerk to a student, the recipient of that negativity is going to be bummed out, and less likely to learn/try that day. If a student is a jerk to me, I will cry. Let's just take down the general badness by about 75% for a month and see how we feel.

5. Torment children with dark stories. Enough said.

6. Everybody just wash your hands. Schools were gross as hell before COVID, now it's like walking into a biological warfare lab every day. Wash your hands, folks.

7. A college education shouldn’t come with a special surprise of life-altering debt.

8. Make school a place people don't hate. I don't have all the answers on this one. Maybe stop designing the places like prisons. Give long lunch breaks. Make it easy for students to find other people like them and discuss their interests. It's a tricky one, for sure. But if we can crack this one, I'm sure that—

What's that? Oh, never mind, budget got slashed again. We're back to gruel in the cafeteria and cutting our counselors' job positions. Let's try again next generation, folks.