The following is part of a series on issues within the higher educational system.
The purpose of a higher education is to educate and enrich the population — at least that is what I thought.
We pay thousands of dollars to secure our place within these courses, all the while doing everything we can, jumping through every hoop in front of us, in order to ensure that we get the degree we need to get a job — to become valuable a human resource to someone’s business.
This is our real primary academic purpose today. And we are educated in the same manner that a car is manufactured: throw us on the assembly line, conduct a series of standardized tests to measure our intelligence, follow that with courses whose primary goal is to weed out the unfit students, and in the end, be left with the ultimate product: a flock of students who, through these four years, have successfully learned how to pass their tests, complete their general education requirements (a.k.a. high school, part two) and conduct themselves in a manner that the current system will approve of, so that they can get a job and fit right in.
Our education is industrialized; we are manufacturing knowledge as opposed to stimulating it. Running through courses, showcasing a GPA that displays an ability to fill in the right bubbles and memorize concepts, students aren’t really challenged to assess themselves or the information’s relevance to our present day.
We memorize. We regurgitate. We get jobs that have nothing to do with most of it.
Understand that this is not me saying that we should not be taught how to get jobs, or that ensuring our financial security shouldn’t be an academic priority. Rather, the issue here is the way our academic institutions are conditioning people for the work force without adequately emphasizing teaching students how to understand themselves and the means in which they can impact the problems our society faces.
It teaches us to get money, out-score the competition and earn the highest mark.
The structure that we have trains us to think individualistically, but ironically doesn’t give us a strong sense of ourselves as individuals. We are taught how to fend for ourselves, without fully understanding how to interpret ourselves.
Based on our current structure, college students are much more capable of telling you about something than they are at telling you about how they feel about it or how it applies to their life. Students are told to be “unbiased” or “objective,” but you’ll be much less likely to remember something if it is not applied to who you are.
For example, if a professor told you to remember a date, a war and the reason it happened, told you to remember it for a quiz, you’d probably memorize it primarily for that day. After that, it slowly fades away, becoming pretty much irrelevant to your life.
You’ve got the grade; that shows that you knew it at one point, so now you can forget it.
However, if that professor gave you the same date, war and reason it happened, then told you to reflect that war to the Iraq war, or gave you some of the information told from a different perspective, you would be much more inclined to remember it, and you would also learn about yourself and your current situation — all in one assignment.
Small fixes like these are the changes that should be considered in the structure of all departments. It would force us to know a lot more than the right question to an answer; it would force us to directly relate ourselves to the content and get what is most important from the issue. Instead we are left thinking, “Why does this matter?” with the only answer being, “Because I need the grade.”
The labor line education we’ve been receiving tells us that we all have a standard to meet and miscellaneous hoops to hop through, and if we don’t meet those standards or hop through those hoops, it is our fault and we are inadequate because of it. We are graded like engines, not understood like humans.
Industrialized education is the reason why we bang our heads against academic walls and force our way through irrelevant courses, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
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