Issues Faced by Education in the 21st Century Essay

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Introduction

Over the decades, there has been significant advancement and progression in education. With such progression comes the incessantly mounting necessities for education to guarantee student and teacher engagement and provide learning prospects for the present-day students. This paper examined the prevailing issues faced by education in the 21st Century. Specifically, the paper will extensively examine issues about the use of technology, the role of teacher educators, student needs and abilities, the interrelations between learning and teaching, in addition to how different internal and external factors have an impact on the learning of the present-day K-12 students.

Students' Need to Belong

One of the most major changes necessitated in education is transforming schools into better communities that not only care but also support the students. The term community is employed to imply a sense of belonging for the students, trust in other students, and also safety. The shortcomings in the present moment are that schools as educational establishments, barely pay attention or focus on the socio-emotional necessities of students either independently or as a group (Osterman, 2000). There is a minimal formal emphasis on the effective necessities of students, and the ideologies and practices shaping culture within the schools are ones that cultivate individualism and competition within the institutions instead of collaboration and community. Moreover, the school establishments have organizational guidelines and practices that methodically preclude and hinder the development of community amongst students and directly lead to students facing segregation, estrangement, and division (Osterman, 2000).

Research indicates that relatedness or connection is one of the fundamental psychological needs of any individual's growth and development. This encompasses the necessity of a person having the sense of being worthy of healthiness and wellbeing. Essentially, this necessity for connection takes into account the need to have a sense of community. When an individual is satisfied in terms of these needs, his or her psychological development is positively affected and has a positive experience of health and welfare. However, in the present educational setting, most of the student's needs are not satisfied, and this results in deteriorated levels of motivation, alienation, hampered intellectual development, and poor academic performance (Osterman, 2000).

Internal and External Classroom Factors

There are different internal and external factors such as class size, democratic classrooms, and standardized curriculum that have an impact on learning and education in the present-day K-12 students.

Class Size

Class size continues to be an aspect of significant contention and controversy in education. This is linked to contrasting assumptions and arguments. On the one hand, parents, teachers, and also school principals have the supposition that smaller class sizes provide an educational setting that is more productive compared to larger class sizes. On the other hand, there is the disinclination of government establishments and other policymakers, in addition to scholars, to support the notion that class size is a key determining factor of educational advancement. It is imperative to note that being devoted to smaller class sizes essentially encompasses having more teachers, and this has substantial resource consequences (Blatchford, Goldstein, and Mortimore, 1998).

Class size is an aspect of great concern in education for various reasons. To begin with, class size plays a pivotal role in the formation of educational plans and allocating resources. Larger class sizes necessitate the planning for more students during lessons and also requiring more resources to facilitate such plans (Blatchford, Goldstein, and Mortimore, 1998). Secondly, class size is significant in the experience of both pupils and teachers. A Higher student to teacher ratio exists in big class size. For instance, in a large classroom, the tasks for teachers are more demanding and strenuous because the educator has to address the concerns of each student. In a large class size, this is challenging and can easily take up time allotted for the lesson. Ultimately, this can bring up the problem of lack of effective teaching because the teacher is unable to deal with the educational challenges faced by each student. Third, there is the issue of discriminatory use of research evidence or the lack of it to service certain perspectives and policies on class sizes (Blatchford, Goldstein, and Mortimore, 1998).

Democratic Classrooms

Incessantly, schools have experienced failure in dealing with educational equity. In accordance to research, in the educational setting, there are issues concerned with inequalities in the financing, economic and technological resources, numbers of trained and qualified teachers, teaching quality, and educational results between students with and deprived of the benefits convened by their racial background, gender, class, language, and disability (Um, 2019).

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Nurturing a classroom community that is authentically democratic and positioning every student as a valued member irrespective of their differences is a major problem in education. This is largely because several students are usually positioned as being less able, not vested in learning, and difficult by different school structures and procedures that are taken for granted. Furthermore, democratic classrooms necessitate every student has the right not just to speak but also to be heard. Some of the prevailing practices that preclude this include the top-down educational practices that may mute students and prevent them from creating their world. Moreover, these practices usually end up preventing the students from giving their points of view that are dissimilar from their educators. This is different from the fact that a democratic classroom should permit and even nurture freedom of speech for every student (Um, 2019).

Democratic classrooms are linked to a generally designed teaching method that provides all students with access to learning experience irrespective of their racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic…

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…unity in terms of how reforms permeated down to districts, school establishments and further down to the classroom.

Moreover, there was a lack of clear and beneficial policy instructions for practitioners in the areas of teaching and financing. Teacher education was deemed to be trailing behind. Systems of accountability with major stakes for school in terms of their report cards and individual students, regarding requirements for graduation, were already in position. Regardless of its efficiency, the educational research community seemed to be lagging behind reform lawmakers and legislators, both locally and nationwide (Chatterji, 2002).

Student Response Systems

Educators in higher education establishments have been coming up with a promising method that employs classroom innovations to encourage student participation and involvement in huge lecture classes and to heighten the awareness of teachers regarding the students; understanding of scientific ideas. When the teacher poses a question within a lecture hall, all higher education students give a response to the question over the network (Penuel et al., 2007). Notably, each of the responses given by the students is unspecified and is instantaneously accumulated and displayed for both the students and the teacher. Therefore, this makes the thinking of the students to be perceptible. Imperatively, owing to such response technology, educators can assimilate such inquisitions with widespread and instantaneous answers from all students into teaching or instruction and utilize the technology for an assortment of purposes. Some of them include prompting the fundamental ideas of the students, decision making on the teacher instructions, sampling students regarding their interests and preferences, and also formative assessment (Penuel et al., 2007).

Conclusion

Albeit there has been remarkable and significant development in education in the past number of decades, there are common issues that are faced in education in the present day. This essay ascertains different factors influencing the learning of K-12 students today. First, there is a need for students to belong. Currently, there is less focus on cultivating school cultures that embrace collaboration and community instead of individualism and competition. Secondly, there are internal and external classroom factors that influence education today. One of them is the massive class sizes that make it challenging for teachers to cater to the academic needs of every student. There is also the issue of top-down educational practices that hamper democratic classrooms that place students to be valued members regardless of their variances. Educator roles is another major issue for present-day education. Teacher educators are unnoticed and unrecognized professions, and their valuable work is overlooked. Furthermore, educators are given an insignificant role in defining and improving teacher quality, yet they are the parties responsible for everyday teaching.

Moreover, students' response systems and school reform and accountability are other issues hampering education. Innovations are necessitated to ensure that students can….....

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