This post explores a view about taking classes at any level, but primarily expresses views regarding compulsory education and college education. What the writer has found might not be in accordance to one own’s precepts regarding education, but he encourages you to first challenge your own views since no one can know which views are correct. It also can help you grow as a person as you begin to think beyond those ideals you have only known. Now, let’s argue and discuss education. The format is deductive so as to give the argument structure.
To begin, we start with the original notion of education as given here:
Definition (Education): Education is a means to learn new skills that either
- one sees valuable in attaining or
- one can use foreseeably well into the future
By this we can see that education is the promoter of useable ideas that can be valuable or worthy in one’s mind. Thus, people do not merely get educated for no reason, there is a set goal in education in the sense that the future of the person depends on it; it was part of the person’s mind to get this kind of knowledge, it did not appear ‘out of nowhere.’
Let’s have a thought experiment. Suppose you want to know how to bake a cake for someone’s birthday. You then look up cake recipes online or videos showing you how to make a cake. You then apply those techniques to make a cake and serve it on the birthday. In our experiment, you saw the knowledge you gained about cakes as valuable and used it in the near future. By the definition of education above, you were educated in cake making. The education worked for you since you has conditions 1 and 2 hold true. Keep this example in mind when you read the rest of this since violating point 1 and 2 is the root of education malfunction in mainstream eduction today.
By the thought experiment, education isn’t necessarily confined to the stereotypical vendors of today, e.g. K-12 schooling and college, and takes place whenever either of the two conditions mentioned above hold true. Thus, one can be ‘educated’ by anyone. Formal education serves the purpose of industrial demand and accreditation so that those who are formally educated are qualified for certain jobs, nothing more. It is society’s way to give status to those people who know things well enough to perform certain jobs and is essential to protect the integrity of those jobs (make sure they are performed well and efficiently). There is nothing wrong with accreditation and going to school to learn, but knowledge and schooling are NOT mutually exclusive and one can learn without formal instruction. However, this type of learning can be rather troublesome as there are currently limited resources to learn outside of academia, at least with the same effect in the same amount of time. The aim of schools thus is to make instruction efficient; they don’t want to waste the person’s time, hence the formalization.
Now, what is going on today (and has been going on since formal education became compulsory) is that people’s views on education become obscured as conditions 1 and 2 were not well defined inside of their minds. People are taking classes since 5 or 6 years of age and don’t know how they can use that knowledge well into their future and hence don’t see any point in paying attention in class. When questioning the system entirely, they are either scoffed at by elders or told with hesitation behind their voice that ‘it will help you later.’ It is at this point where the education system losses its efficacy as its students are becoming mindless, attending classes for either
- Earning good marks
- Impressing peers (bragging rights)
- Validating intelligence/self-worth (passed X, hence feel Y)
- Making mommy and daddy proud
- Avoiding scoldings for poor marks
- Earning a nominal degree for the faint promise of a job (in today’s economy)
In all of these cases we have people performing actions without seeing how their knowledge directly affects their future as well as others. Because of this, the whole idea of knowledge is jeopardized and what people see instead are score points in some twisted game now conceptualized as ‘life.’ In this game one earns an education, learning what is considered mundane and then finds some vocation that uses maybe 50% of what they invested time on. Life is no game, however. All of the achievements of man which we rely on in modern society came from hard thought which is stunningly demoted in terms of importance in mainstream teaching. Students are not being taught how to think but rather how to pass classes without caring what was actually done in that amount of time. Taking any course at any level is an investment of time and resources no matter how one looks at it, for money fuels any societal action, education being on of them. With this in mind, it would naturally follow that both students and teachers would be on the same page each day. Humorously, the opposite effect has been found, is found, and looks to found in the future! Teachers face students who don’t want to be there and students face courses they couldn’t care less about taking, both of which violate the two points in the definition of education. After all, when one wishes to learn there is an idea of what is to be learned as well as a need to know that information and when one teaches, they assume their audience is prepared to expand their knowledge in this specific way taught. Yet, place education as something that is outside of one’s choice and the chemical reactions between student and teacher are rather volatile, especially before college when the students are still growing up.
We find that student’s learning is not as crisp as the person who wanted to make the birthday cake in the thought experiment. For this reason, both teaching and learning are inefficient as students don’t have interest and teachers fail to receive immediate feedback. As such, students fail to learn in depth and with gusto and teachers can’t find ways to improve their courses without addressing the thought, ‘how can I make them pay attention/care today….’ Come to think of it, it is rather funny to think people sign up for courses they don’t want to be in and people teach courses with those people in them. This is akin to ordering items off of Amazon that one had no plan on buying:
Person 1: Just bought a deck of cards.
Person 2: Cool! Do you play card games?
Person 1: Actually no… I hate card games.
Person 2: ??? Then why buy them?
The purpose of a course is defeated and the K-12 curriculum and undergraduate degree programs fail to take this into account in their programs. Instead we have departments pondering why students don’t show up to lecture and how to make students more punctual. All of this would be unnecessary if both teachers and students were in accordance (think birthday cake intention for the students and teachers). Students are not monkeys who show up when there are bananas and teachers are not zookeepers, making sure the monkeys are well fed and amused. Everyone is human, makes their own decisions and elects classes they wish/think can help them in their lives or career. In this respect a person’s grade is minuscule in comparison with what they have demonstrated; good grades entail good knowledge, however the aim was the utility of the knowledge, not the knowledge itself. This makes it so that A’s and B’s are indistinguishable and personal projects are of supreme importance; it is a utility of the knowledge and every product on the shelf was the output of a project which cleverly used the knowledge from different domains for a set goal. The writer will end with this dialogue concerning the education system; we are at an ice cream shop and the teacher is the rocket and the student is the potato:
Rocket: In order to be a delicious potato one needs to eat their ice cream!
Potato: I don’t even like ice cream, I don’t see how it can help me, it looks boring otherwise…
Rest of the Potatoes: We agree!
Rocket: It has sprinkles! Now eat your ice cream!
—Potatoes stop showing up for ice cream gradually, especially on Fridays…
Rocket: Why are the potatoes who signed up for ice cream not eating it?
Potatoes: Because it was on the list of things to eat before graduating into baked potatoes.
In short, students who don’t want certain knowledge or don’t see how it can help them in the future are in courses designed for the opposite types of students, creating a conflict for teacher and student for generations past and yet to come. The writer hopes you take these thoughts with a grain of salt, but it sums up education and how making it compulsory takes away one’s intentions for learning which prove vital for benefiting from that information. Anyway, see you next time!