One of the history's greatest figures, Nelson Mandela, once said: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Over the course of years, this statement has only become more relevant. Maybe that is the reason why the topic of the decline of the American education has been recently spurring such a heated debate among national academic and teaching communities. In “The Chronicle of Higher Education”, Carl Singleton, a faculty member at Fort Hays State University, also presented his reflections concerning the U.S. education system.
In the article titled “What Our Education System Needs is More F’s”, Singleton proposes a solution to the crisis of American education. As he argues, the main cause of the poor quality
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Of course, we are not talking here about students whose comprehension is severely impaired, because they are usually schooled individually and have a special grading system, adjusted to their needs and abilities. But in the classrooms there are often students with less obvious disabilities, which, although less severe, can also create academic challenges. Some of them, such as dyslexia or dyscalculia, are directly related to learning and may affect the speed at which students acquire the material. Others, such as anxiety or ADHD may not only disrupt learning, but also are very likely to cause discrepancies between the students’ subject knowledge and their exam and assignment results.
Whatever the reasons of students’ learning difficulties are, one thing is sure: the solution proposed by Singleton would only make their struggle harder. In this particular case, failing students and “keeping them at one level until they did in time, one way or another, learn the material,” as suggested by Singleton, could only bring positive effects if it went hand-in-hand with the development of a comprehensive learning support