Are we learning enough?

Aiyana Matthis

Students wonder what they will learn about in history and other classes at school now that so much of the world has changed/ Are enough voices being heard?

School is for educating students. But we’re educated on a very few, selected topics.

Our curriculum needs to be expanded so that we are learning as much as we can be, making us superior in education.

Although Abington Public Schools incorporates material about different ethnicities and culture, are we including enough of them? Hundreds of different countries learn about thousands of different places. Different regions have studied the US and we haven’t even learned about them.

Unless we’ve had a direct conversation about someone from one of these countries or research them ourselves, we don’t learn much about other places or people in the world. We only learned fragments of the world outside of the US. Never the full picture.

We students are only learning at the surface level. Learning the basics. And we repeat a lot of the same topics as well. Our brains could absorb so much more. So why don’t we learn more?

A lack of education plays a role in ignorance. This lack of education is where assumptions commence. This lack leads to the danger of a single story.

Many people from various backgrounds come to Abington and learn about our history. Isn’t it time we learned about theirs?

Abington Public School holds many people of different cultures, ethnicities, and religions. We should be learning about those histories as well. Yes, we learn about slavery and few selected topics in history, but there is so much more.

We have students who are Egyptian, Brazilian, and more. There are students from so many fascinating places and backgrounds that we know nothing about.

We have students who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim and so on. All students should be included because no race or religion is more important than the other.

Learning more about a variety of places and cultures gives minority students  a chance to connect and speak about their history. They could even learn more their roots and even discover knew things they may have not learned themselves. It would also be their chance to erase false assumptions and correct any errors.

Broadening our horizons would help the students to better understand other students from different areas.

Education should be about soaking up as much information as possible. We cannot understand what we don’t know about. We must be given opportunities to learn about each other so that we can understand each other.