Money and Education

The ability of students to perform well in school is inextricably tied to the funding a student is given to finance their education. This has been true since the time of the Romans when public schooling was non-existent, and the way a Roman citizen would become educated was through hiring a Greek tutor, who would teach their students in a costly one-on-one setting.

In modern times, teachers are divided into classrooms with dozens of students; while it is good that many students make use of one teacher's salary, each student needs their own funding to succeed. Books, paper, writing tools, and so many other things are all required by students so they can interact with the material to a sufficient enough degree that they can absorb it, but to get material to students, that can be done very cheaply. An example of extremely low-budget education would be to give each student a textbook with only works explaining the topic in detail. This method wouldn't work for a few reasons, but the chief issue would be that this would be extremely boring for students due to the drab and cost-efficient method of education. 

As educators and students, we all know how hard it is to learn or teach when a given topic is boring. People want to learn things that are dramatic or have some color so that way their brains can absorb the information. This is evident in how we can watch a 40-minute video on YouTube about a topic that interests us, but we roll our eyes when we have to watch a 5-minute video for a class.

However, making content engaging costs money. It costs salaries for teachers that go through the trouble of tricking students into eating their vegetables. It costs money, so students and teachers have computers to make education more interactive through the use of intuitive tools and games. It costs money so that students can do activities that show education topics in practical and tangible terms. It costs money to bus students to field trip locations to see real-world applications of taught materials, but if students are funded in ways so that they can't have these more engaging methods of education, then it should be no surprise as to why students fail to learn boring and colorless topics.