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In the past few decades there have been drastic changes in the education system in the United States. These changes far outreach our grandparents’ stories about walking 8 miles to school in the snow (uphill both ways of course) and have spilled over into the actual instruction itself. Class sizes are larger, we grapple with overcrowding in many heavily populated areas, and graduation rates have slipped drastically. Currently the United States is ranked 51^st in the subjects of Science and Mathematics worldwide. So one must beg the question: are we getting soft on education? I would like to precede this discussion by disclosing that I am not an educational professional but only a student, worker bee and mother with an opinion.

Having no school aged children of my own I’ve heard horror stories from my friends and colleagues who do have children in our local public and private schools. Among the most disturbing changes that I’ve encountered has been the introduction of calling math problems math “facts”. The word “problem” apparently is considered to have too negative a connotation. For as long as I can remember in my education and professional life I’ve been weak in the subject of math. I could pass the subject but it required immersion in it, finding a way of solving the problems that I could wrap my brain around. I simply don’t “think” that way; I can’t reason it out for some reason. So for me, a math problem is most definitely a problem. But it seems illogical to me that dressing it up with a nicer, gentler name would have made me embrace it more easily. I feel that by giving difficult subjects or problems a more politically correct or easier to process name in effect we’re sheltering our children. What happens when they do become old enough to go out into the world where there are problems and that’s exactly what they’re called? Will they be searching for a softer way of looking at the issue in order to cope with it? What does this mean for their reasoning skills?

The second most disturbing trend I’m hearing about in schools is awarding each and every student for something, no matter how mundane the achievement. I’ve even heard of students as young as kindergarten age receiving an award on a monthly basis. As parents we all want our children to feel special and successful, but is celebrating mediocrity the way to go about that? What does that say for the future of work ethic? If each student comes along knowing that no matter how poor their performance they’ll be rewarded for something it seems to me that they have no incentive to work hard. If they become appeased with mediocrity beginning at such a young age they’ll know that it’s okay to slide by.

Coupled with softening the terms we use for difficult subject matter this new advent in education equals what I predict will be a much softer generation of people, unaccustomed to facing and overcoming challenges and complacent in their mediocrity. United States students performed better on the world stage in the past where problems were called problems and rewards were given only to those who worked hard to achieve something. If the system worked so well back then with regard to these two topics, why fix what isn’t broken?