Today’s educational paradigm of oversimplification has caused intellectuals such as me a great deal of grief. The lure of simplicity is the crux upon which knowledge today is distilled down to a palatable elixir. But to take simplification to the extent of pacifying the lowest common denominator is a panacea we guzzle down without pausing to consider the consequences.

The dummy approach to public education began with promises of ease and efficiency. It gathered approval with the claims that the more palatable we make the knowledge we impart, the more lives we touch for the better.  With good intentions, educators shaved away at the edges of complex ideas, watering down the intricacies, and delighting in the resulting smoothness of simplified expression.

Few bothered to ask, however, what would be lost, and that would often be the context in which certain concepts are best understood. Many complex laws of Nature are reduced in today’s textbooks to mere facts and figures that you simply must accept as truth so you can pass your tests and proceed through your compulsory education without hassle or delay. Let’s just say, even in my time, there was great hassle, although fortunately I made it through without delay.

We’re becoming a world full of young and impressionable individuals molded into cookie-cutter shapes, pressed out by a giant rolling pin of oversimplification which flattens our natural curiosity and passion for understanding. The rich fields of learning become washed away, leaving behind a drab emaciated landscape where the nuances of ideas are lost, diluted to the point where we can no longer discern their true forms.

In haste to make knowledge digestible, those supposedly wiser than we in affairs of educating our youth have unwittingly choked life from it. Who did we leave in charge of this terrible campaign? How could we let this happen knowingly to our younger contemporaries?

Whomever they are, they’ve taken the lush galleries of human intellect and blotted them with cheap, watered-down paint from the dollar store. Now, with teachers severely hampered by standardized testing and stupefying mandates, it seems today’s schooling elite have mastered the art of teaching our students just enough to perform the song and dance, but not enough to truly hear the music or appreciate its aesthetics.

For today’s youth, what my generation once knew as the mighty tree of Knowledge has been relentlessly pruned and trimmed, its sprawling branches reduced to a skeletal framework. Beneath this bony canopy, the next generation now gathers, most eyes fixed on the ground, unable to see the rich fruits that once hung within the grasp of our youthful exuberance. The schools and universities we once envisioned as flourishing orchards of promising young minds have become sad gardens of stunted saplings, struggling to sprout amidst the depleted soils rapidly degraded by oversimplification.

As I watch younger generations traverse this newly paved path of reductionist uniformity, I mourn the seemingly lost art of inquisitiveness. The natural hunger to explore and dissect the world is suppressed, replaced by a mechanical chorus of voices regurgitating predigested facts and canned opinions. In our pursuit of sanitized simplicity, we’ve created a generation too afraid to question and too content not to conform.

I pity those trapped within the emaciated specter of our once-proud educational system. My heart weighs heavy with the knowledge that it’s robbing our youth of the vibrant, multifaceted world that is their birthright. We have traded the treasures of thought-provoking and actionable human understanding for the monochromatic convenience of oversimplification. Even as I now sit far from the four walls of a classroom, I can’t help but wonder if we have doomed our progeny to a future of mediocrity, forever shackling our future hopes to the lowest common denominator.

~ Amelia Desertsong