My father recently sent me this Op-Ed piece from the New York Times about the collapse of education in the United States. I found this article to be particularly interesting. As I was reading about how the United States has drastically fallen behind in almost every aspect of education, I couldn’t help but ponder about how I felt about the situation. As a American college student pursuing higher education, am I helping to sway this trend? Probably not. I am but a single drop of water in a rainstorm. The real problem resides in our society and its culture. We have become lazy. Whether it is reading Sparknotes or copying your math homework from a friend, academic laziness is rampant. Technology has largely contributed to this.

Digital media and all its aspects have given our youth a massive vice by which to procrastinate. Even as I write this blog, I am constantly tempted to open up a new tab and check Facebook. (Resist it! Don’t give in to your temptations.) On the other hand, technology also has a massive beneficial potential for education. It allows for asynchronous communication between professor and student. It allows for the use of calculating functions on programs like Excel. It has revolutionized the old status quo of doing everything from writing a research paper to coordinating schedules for working on a group assignment with a classmate.

I feel that the United States must take advantage of the beneficial aspects of education technology. Many of our schools lack technology and their students pay the price. We must reform our education system and make the development of well-rounded students our priority. I believe the key to solving the procrastination problem our students face is to make the benefits of using technology more rewarding (ie: making educational tools more fun).

I have two cousins in elementary school (3rd and 5th grade). They are very bright, but I fear that they are too attracted to playing video games and the internet that they may fall behind in the future. For the sake of our children and our nation as a whole, we need to revamp our education system. This starts with the revision of technology use in the classroom.