Sam Bartelt

I am tired of people getting on the internet and talking about the current-day education system as if their lives are at all impacted by it and as if they know everything that’s going on. For instance, there is a far too large number of people who believe that everywhere in the USA right now, sex education is a class that is segregated by gender, which it’s not. As the namesake of this article suggests, I believe that if you are not a student, teacher, parent of a student, etc., then you shouldn’t be talking about the current system as if you have any idea of what is going on.

Even as someone who, less than a year ago, was in high school, I’m not really comfortable talking about high school education. Now, I do believe that I know more about the southern Minnesota education system than an adult who is much older than me, as, again, I was there less than a year ago. 

I brought up “southern Minnesota” for a specific reason. I have absolutely zero clue what’s going on in the education system in Texas, or Chicago, or LA County, etc., so I, of course, don’t think it would be appropriate for me to talk about it. I do not know enough about the systems from different areas where I have never been, nor will I ever be a student in those areas. Unless 

information was presented to me on the news and fact-checked, I simply do not know enough to form an opinion on those systems. So I think it’s dumb for people to believe every little piece of gossip they hear about schools in “liberal cities,” like litterboxes for furries in the bathrooms. If you’re not from there and have no ties there, and the information you were given was from a random Facebook blog or “totallytruenews.com,” maybe, just maybe, you should hold your breath when it comes to speaking about the issues in question.

If you are a parent of a child in the school system, I also believe that you have a right to speak your mind on the system. That is, only if you are being told accurate information by your 

children. I’m sure all of us have complained to our parents about how “school is hell” and “everything and everyone sucks,” when in reality all you had to do was write a 300-word 

essay. I am also sure that we’ve all heard horror stories from teachers who get reprimanded by parents because these parents “could never see their perfect little angel doing anything wrong” and that it’s the school’s fault for failing the child. Kids lie, plain and simple. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to them, but know when they say that their teacher hates their guts, they might just mean they had to do an assignment that they didn’t want to do, or they got their phone taken away in class.

You may have seen online a practice known as “unschooling.” It’s often described by people who follow this practice as a form of self-driven homeschooling, where the kids in question are 

learning about the things that they themselves are interested in. Sounds awesome, right? Well, that’s not exactly how the practice is done most of the time. It’s basically just regular 

parenting, where your kids ask questions, and you answer them to the best of your ability, and if you don’t know, you look it up. But in this, they’re just not in school. It almost 

always stems from the adults’ outdated perspective on the school system. Leaving these poor kids not being able to read or write, and them not knowing things like the Holocaust. 

Creating these strongly negative opinions on the education system when you yourself don’t have a proper grasp on the subject can end in very poor situations.