School System Efficiencies and Otherwise

Within every stage of my life, I have been a part of some organization, but I never took an active role in them until I got to high school. As a general member, I found, and still find it difficult to relate to the group as a whole, because there are so many different personalities and paradigms for making the organization’s actions successful. I learned to determine the size of organizations in relation to the time it meets. An organization that meets infrequently, but has 20 active members, may seem larger than another that has 40 active members but meets proportionately more.

I consider my high school sports team to be an organization in its own rite, and correspondingly I was a captain. For anonymity’s sake, the sport will be volleyball. As a perceived leader, I realized how much power people in managerial positions may not have. My responsibilities were to make sure everyone went to study hours, had rides to practice, and performed to their maximum potential, while also doing all of these things and being a good representative of the team and our school. I learned that some of my responsibilities were contradictory, because, depending upon a team composition, the difficulty of keeping everyone and myself perfectly in line varies from ease to impossibility.

Growing up, I thought volleyball captains were a step below coaches in terms of judicial power, but I found myself unable to force actions out of other players, unless they saw a benefit in doing so. For some members, that meant proof that what I was asking them to do worked and for others that meant I had to do it with them. I did not know how to motivate everyone to perform better. Furthermore, I could not cut players who did not do what I said, so when I asked my supervisors for assistance, I expected things to happen right away. Change did not happen right away, if at all, because they had to do their own situational analysis so I questioned the purpose of my position. How can organizations be successful if they move slowly in their actions? Are organizations, like high school sports teams, have a shorter long-run more successful, or just more rash and ineffective? High school volleyball acted as a microcosm in my own analysis of public schools in my state.

I find the system of secondary education to be especially interesting, because the quality of education is not across the state. As my membership as a high school senior came to a conclusion, I began finding the educational system to be inefficient to my needs, but also my classmates and societal progression. With a macro approach, in an efficient, consumer-minded society, the reason would be that some students will work best with jobs that do not require academic education. It could also mean that it is societally more efficient to choose what jobs people must take. However, there are ideological and moral issues with both of these philosophies which have intersections nonetheless. If students are able to specialize their educations earlier, assuming they do not change their desired profession, they will undoubtedly be more proficient, but instead they must participate in a school with a rigid academic structure that does not align with their preferred education.  Not only does this make the education system more efficient, but it also gives people with lower incomes, who are more likely to resort to criminal activities, an opportunity to participate in more societally productive activities. Then again, it’s nearly impossible to know if a student will change their minds and decide to do something else if they are exposed to a new field of study. If, to combat this, the government (organization) chose to choose what they studied, inevitably, some people would be forced to pursue what they would not, and without violent force, they would be more inefficient.

I believe that, before all else, we should prioritize making our education system more efficient.