In today’s society, the American education system is not at its peak; it’s corrupt and polluted with twisted appeals towards money and business. This makes a real education hard to earn, but easy to be handed over via a sheet of paper. Unfortunately, there’s not much individuals can do except raise awareness and hope for a fix. One individual, Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, discusses these ideas in a book titled Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education. One of his essays in particular, “Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment,” talks about the numerous phenomena happening in American school systems. About halfway through his essay, while on a rant about colleges competing against one another for students, Edmundson
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Many people grow up and have their thoughts and beliefs trained and suppressed, and all throughout their early academic career, they spew out their parents’ thoughts, nothing more than a tape recorder replaying its message over and over for other tape recorders. Although there are people who grow up unsheltered with the freedom to seek out the answers to their own endless curiosities and form their own beliefs, it’s hard to find someone without some kind of value on a mental “constraint” or belief passed on from their parents. When someone is looking to settle their curiosities, being exposed to rigorous courses, especially in philosophy, psychology, and ancient literature could reshape a person’s entire outlook on life. The humanities is by far the most powerful division of education in regards to soul-shaping; numbers and formulas won’t do that, not even when you learn there are infinitely many numbers between 1 and 2 alone. But discovering the answers to their curiosities makes students question the world around them, their personal motives and values, and what they live for; confrontational and bold questions are raised that cannot (and will never) be answered through hypothesized experiments or calculated with a formula of variables. Students need to sweat and squirm in their seats under these kinds of
Many people grow up and have their thoughts and beliefs trained and suppressed, and all throughout their early academic career, they spew out their parents’ thoughts, nothing more than a tape recorder replaying its message over and over for other tape recorders. Although there are people who grow up unsheltered with the freedom to seek out the answers to their own endless curiosities and form their own beliefs, it’s hard to find someone without some kind of value on a mental “constraint” or belief passed on from their parents. When someone is looking to settle their curiosities, being exposed to rigorous courses, especially in philosophy, psychology, and ancient literature could reshape a person’s entire outlook on life. The humanities is by far the most powerful division of education in regards to soul-shaping; numbers and formulas won’t do that, not even when you learn there are infinitely many numbers between 1 and 2 alone. But discovering the answers to their curiosities makes students question the world around them, their personal motives and values, and what they live for; confrontational and bold questions are raised that cannot (and will never) be answered through hypothesized experiments or calculated with a formula of variables. Students need to sweat and squirm in their seats under these kinds of