The Main Urban Education Issues Facing Society

By Michelle Robinson


There is a growing number of educational institutions in the cities and towns. The rise in their number is partly as a counter to the growing population in the areas. The growing number of children in the high population areas has increased the need for more institutions. However, it is this growth that has led to an increase in challenges that are being experienced in the areas and within the institutions in such highly populated places. Here are some of the main urban education issues experienced in educational institutions.

The number of students in the institutions are too large and may sometimes get out of hand. The academic institutions in highly populated places are overcrowded with students. This leads to problems in sanitation as well as in the sharing of inadequate resources. The proportionate ratio of students to teachers in such schools leads to generally divided teacher's attention to their students. This may lead to poor performance by students.

The teachers are never enough. The growing number of students has not been catered for well by the increase of teachers. With the spiraling number of students in the institutions, the number of teachers has not been increased at the same ratio to counter the increase in student population. This puts so much strain on the few teachers that are there.

The institutions are underfunded. The government is not doing enough to provide the school with enough money needed to run them more effectively. The increase in student population automatically calls for an increase in funding so that the institutions can avail enough resources. However, this is not always the case.

The educators are overworked. Since the government fails to hire enough teachers as a countermeasure to cater for the growing number of students, the educators find themselves in a very tight situation. They have to work extra hard to be able to serve a large number of students. And since they are not paid for the extra work, they are often very demoralized.

Teachers are encountered with the task of teaching in multilingual classrooms. Teachers who have multilingual abilities may not suffer so much but their counterparts who only use English as their teaching language find it difficult to interact with the foreign students. The students also risk missing on so much. This is one of the problems that has been difficult to solve since it would require that teachers be taught more languages at the college level.

Noise and air pollution are rampant in cities and towns. Unlike is rural where there is no or little factories and congestion, in the cities things are different. This makes the academic institutions in those places vulnerable to the effects of such pollution. In some cases, the lessons may be interrupted by the noise that is coming from factories, people and cars.

Academic institutions have students from diverse cultures. Even those foreign students who have a good understanding of the English language may not be well acquainted with English or American cultures. This makes it difficult for them to interact with other people from cultures that are different from theirs.




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