What Is The Purpose Of Education?

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One of the most important things in life is education. While most people assume education has a direct correlation to school, people often learn more things outside of school without realizing it. Learning plays a pivotal role in our lives. Benjamin Franklin once said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” The question we should ask ourselves is whether or not our education system in America really succeeds in its purpose. I believe it does not. While it focuses around important subjects we need to learn in our lives, it fails in its purpose to teach students that very information.
Often enough, students fall behind without meaning to because their focus strays from the task at hand. While they may not mean to, the information they are being taught often bores them to the point of making it hard for them to understand. Instead of trying to fix this problem, we have, as a country, increased the difficulty of our education system to make up for the lack of higher tests scores in this country. An example of this increase in difficulty includes more tests and homework at younger ages. As stated by Jim Taylor, “Homework is now given as early as first grade and reaches its apogee in high school where students now spend up to seven hours a night on homework, despite evidence demonstrating that it has no value up to 5th grade and loses its value if greater than one hour for middle-school students and two hours for high-school students” (Taylor). It has caused a lot of students to fall behind even further in their studies. Students of today have become discouraged to learn despite the human instincts to want to learn more. A perfect way to explain the enormity of the issue is to compare our education rankings to those of the Asian countries. While countries like Japan and China have some of the best education systems in the world, we have a fairly mediocre to below average education system in general (Barshay). One of the reasons for
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Most students, albeit some, learn better in circumstances where the teacher understands those students’ strengths and weaknesses more. If a teacher learns a student’s strengths and weaknesses, it could easily help get the information across to that particular student. Everybody has weaknesses in learning certain subjects. In the same matter, everybody has strengths as well. Communication from teacher and student can pinpoint these strengths and weaknesses to help teach students in the best way possible (M. Boynton and C. Boynton). Charles C. Haynes and Marvin W. Berkowitz states, “Reading and math are important, but if we care about our kids (and our future), shouldn 't we be paying more attention to the kinds of human beings who do the math and read the books?” (Haynes and …show more content…
It is, however, something that needs to be done. Instead of continuing to increase the difficulty of our common core classes, we should try to make it where students want to learn it. This can start from something as simple as requiring students to take classes that have to do with arts and music every year. Another thing we can do is put more money into education, which includes raising the salary for teachers who teach their students what they need to learn. Everything starts with simple steps, but it eventually turns into something bigger and better in the

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