My DCBRP placement has me thinking a lot on Public Education. Please, bear my thoughts:
Wasn’t that the American promise? Work hard, do well in school, and you can have a better life? This promise fosters an organic hope, which leads you to believe that even if you are born in the wrong neighborhood, that education is your ticket out of it. But what happens when a school fails a kid? What happens over time?
With evidence, it was once believed the sound barrier could not be broken. Airplane pilots who flew too near the sound barrier would experience an uncontrollable situation and lose control of their airplane, often resulting in death. Pilots and the like could not understand why the aircrafts became uncontrollable once hitting that certain speed. Their crafts had hit a sonic wall, a.k.a. a brick wall, thus creating the belief that the sound barrier could not be broken.
Simply, the aircrafts needed an engine with enough power that would push it through the brick wall. Solution: Built an engine that would go faster than the speed of sound. Simple, right? Not quite. Building an engine with enough power came challenges like engineering heat-resistant metals, and creating such an engine was seen as too hard. It was thought these difficulties were insurmountable leaving the building of such an engine to be ignored for almost a decade. However, in time, an engine was created that helped American pilot Chuck Yeager to break the sound barrier.
The belief on not being able to break the sound barrier reminds me of our issues facing our public school system, where the problems are seen as too hard and too big to fix. Sometimes I think it’s easier to think of the millions of children that are in our schools, look at the numbers and all the problems, scratch our heads, throw up our hands, and give up rather than look at just one and ask ourselves, “Did we do the right thing? Did we do enough?”
