A couple of recent reports got me thinking about the education system as it stands today. The first is an article posted on MSN.com by Eric Gorski reporting Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s findings in their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. They discuss the not-so-shocking discovery that college students are actually not learning much in college at all. The second article, by Stephen C. Webster, is from RawStory.com. He discusses the increasing worldwide youth movement of radical, disgruntled citizens speaking out against their governments. These issues, of course, are linked.
Gorski states, “45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.” Furthermore, “Half [of the more than 2,300 students polled] did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.” Meanwhile, Webster recounts riots in England over tuition rate hikes, pointing out that “A full 17 percent of those ages 18-29 said yes, that violence [against the US government] would be justified.” The common thread is dissatisfaction. Students are academically beat.
This problem breaks down simply. More students than ever before are graduating high school, going to college, and getting degrees; it is a matter of supply and demand. If everyone has a bachelor’s degree, the demand for educated workers will necessarily go down, because the work market is flooded. So these students, who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt, have few—if any—opportunities to make the kind of money they need to live a comfortable lifestyle and repay their student loans. A bachelor’s degree in English lands one a cozy job as a bartender, not as a copy-editor, teacher, or journalist. Furthermore, more and more students are realizing that their diploma is little more than a glorified receipt for a great deal of money paid. But this issue is twofold; many students are only in college to get that degree and do not care about actually receiving an education. These are the students, visible in classrooms across the country, who text during class, browse Facebook, chat on MSN, skip class often, and fall asleep during lectures.
When will schools implement a zero tolerance policy for this behavior? Moreover, when will students demand that these schools do so? If colleges demanded results, if they demanded excellence, then degrees would be scarcer, yes, but more valuable. That is not to say, of course, that their price should actually increase further. Education is expensive enough: students are already fed up with not getting what they pay for. The greatest insult of all, though, is the exorbitant tuition rates to begin with. The US funds an outrageously expensive, destructive, and utterly pointless war. The US allows a rampant, over-exploited welfare system to soak up tax dollars. The US gives bailouts to greedy, corrupt corporations that are giving away extravagant bonuses to their executives and sending jobs overseas to slash costs . . . and the American economy.
So, after being spoon-fed patriotic propaganda from the day of their birth, America’s youth have come to realize that they are actually living in a vicious, corrupt, power-hungry country that does not truly care about the best interests of all its citizens. The “greatest country in the world, the land of opportunity” is a mere illusion, cleverly fabricated to prevent the asking of questions. Conformity, the American dream.
Then the Internet comes along and changes the entire social and educational fabric, a development whose wake is still affecting every aspect of twenty-first century life. The illusion of that “American dream” breaks down with the ability to instantly share information. In the wake of WikiLeaks, corruption and lies have become front and center in the public mind. The ability to literally look up any bit of information and acquire knowledge at the press of a few buttons has produced an intellectual revolution, one more successful and permeating more circles than formal education ever could. As a result, America’s youth is learning the truth behind the lies their parents believed and taught them in turn. And understandably, they are displeased.
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