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Change in the education system
Change in the education system
Negative effects of standardized testing
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Thirty thousand eight hundred and fourteen dollars, that is how much my first year at college costs but what am I actually paying for? College is supposed to be a time for growth, experience and learning, but is that what is actually happening? The answer to that question is no; beginning in grade school, students are taught the exact opposite. Although teachers have tried to make school more engaging, it is no longer about learning and students are going to be greatly affected by this change. Parents and students are paying for college only to have an education system that tears down individuality, and is non beneficial to students’ learning.
School has evolved from teaching about learning and independent thinking to teaching about obedience. As John Gatto, a former New York City Teacher of the Year, explains in his article “Dumbing Us Down: Weapons of Mass Instruction”, schools used to teach “independent thought, appreciation for great works, and an experience of the world not found within the confines of a classroom” (Gatto 524). There was a point in time where school used to be a place to go to learn, not to have the highest ACT scores, attendance, or GPAs. Now-a-days school is about how obedient a student can be, and the “routines are set up to discourage you from self-discovery” (Gatto 523). Administrations are more concerned about how well their students can do on performance tests than how well students actually learn the material. In high school and grade school, students sit in class for eight hours and listen to teachers lecture at them and then go home to do hours worth of homework. The only aspect that changes from this routine in college is that it is much harder and students spend more time studying and doing home...
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...e individuals that could afford to go to college?
Works Cited
Carey, Kevin. “College Consumerism Run Amok.” Perspectives on Argument. 7th ed. Ed. Nancy
V. Wood. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2012. 530-531. Print.
Gatto, John Taylor. “Dumbing Us Down: Weapons of Mass Instruction.” Perspectives on
Argument. 7th ed. Ed. Nancy V. Wood. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2012. 523-527. Print.
Jaschik, Scott. “Getting Out of Grading.” Perspectives on Argument. 7th ed. Ed. Nancy V. Wood.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2012. 528-530. Print.
Joseph, Marc. "It's Too Expensive to Go to College Anymore." The Huffington Post.
TheHuffingtonPost.com, 17 Sept. 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2014.
Miners, Zach. “Twitter Goes to College.” Perspectives on Argument. 7th ed. Ed. Nancy V. Wood.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2012. 533-535. Print.
Community colleges and vocational tracks are not wrong about the high cost of traditional higher education. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, one year at a public, four-year institution costs upwards of $23,000 on average, while private institutions will cost nearly $10,000 more on average. Coupled with the fact that prices at public institutions rose 42 percent and private institutions rose 31 percent between 2001 and 2011, it’s not a shock that parents and students alike worry about paying for college. However, this won’t always be the case, as this rise in prices simply cannot continue the way it has. Eventually, people will be unable to pay the price that colleges charge. They will either settle for com...
There was a time in America where college was based solely on merit, higher education and pursuing the American Dream to obtain a career and gain social status to be successful in society. According to the Economist newspaper, rising fees and increase of student debt, shared with dwindling financial and educational returns, are undermining at least the perception that university is a good investment. Now due to high cost of an average good university, students are leaving college owing back over $100,000 and are not getting the job of their original dreams.
We live in a society where we are surrounded by people telling us that school/education and being educated is the only way to succeed. However, the school system is not up to the standards we want it to uphold. There are three issues we discuss the most which are the government, the student, and the teacher. In John Taylor Gatto 's essay “Against School”, we see the inside perspective of the educational system from the view of a teacher. In “I Just Wanna Be Average”, an essay written by Mike Rose, we hear a student 's experience of being in a vocational class in the lower level class in the educational system when he was supposed to be in the higher class. Both Gatto and Rose give their opinions on how the educational system is falling apart. Today the government is only trying to get students to pass, making it hard for teachers to teach what they want. Students are affected everyday by the school system. They sit there - bored - and do not think that the teachers care, making the
Farber, Jerry “ A Young Person’s Guide to the Grading System” Dissent Fall 1997: 102-04 in Mary Lynch Kennedy and Haley M. Smith. Reading and writing in the Academic Community. 2nd ed, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall 2001. 333-336.
...rtisan Discussion of Political & Social Issues for Debate (Pros and Cons - Decision Making Politics). Retrieved March 12, 2014, from http://www.balancedpolitics.org/school_testing.htm
Wheeler, Timothy. “There’s a Reason They Choose Schools.” National Reviewer 11 Oct. 2007. Rpt. in Practical Argument: A Text and Anthology. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 618-20. Print.
Smith, Morgan. "After Misuse, a Push for Tutoring." New York Times. 20 Oct. 2013: A.25A. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.
Perry, Robert T. ""On 'Real Education'"." Practical Argument: A Text and Anthology. Ed. Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 625-627. Print.
White, Fred D., and Simone J. Billings. The Well-crafted Argument: Across the Curriculum. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013. Print.
In high school, the teacher pretty much babysits the students. The teacher always has to get on their students to pay attention in class, to do their work, and to stay awake during the lecture. Also high school teachers don’t really expect their students to read ahead in their textbooks. In college the professors are very different. College professors expect the best from their students, because they know that their students are spending a very large sum of money in their education. The professors expect their students to read their textbooks before class, and to do their homework. They also expect their students to stay awake during the lecture, if not they will kick the student out. College professors don’t care if a student doesn’t turn in their homework or if they forget to read a chapter in their textbook. College professors are not worried about this because it’s not their grade, they already have their degree. Also, college professors won’t accept any late work. They also are very strict on absences and most college professors will rarely give any extra credit to replace a student’s absences. This is one of the reasons why high school teachers and professors are not the
Sides: Clashing Views on Educational Issues. 14th ed. Ed. Dennis L. Evans. Dubuque: McGraw-Hill Contemporary Learning Series, 2008. Print.
Orenstein, Peggy. “I Tweet, Therefore I Am.” What Matters In America. Third Edition.Gary Goshgarian and Kathryn Goodfellow. New Jersey: Pearson, 2012. 40-43. Print.
A statement from the Huffington Post states, “From a very young age, we are told the importance of getting good grades. Especially in high school, we are told time and time again that our grades affect what college we will get into. While grades are extremely important, people often forget about the importance of learning, not just getting good grades. There is a difference between the grade received in a course and the amount of learning that took place in the course.” Parents and institutions should teach the importance of learning. The society around the upbringing of students emphasizes getting good grades as apposed to getting every detail and aspect mastered. School priorities should be reevaluated and changed for future students
...ke school something that the students can look back on and think that it was a meaningful time where they learned a lot about life instead of a time where they thought they would have a break down because they got a low score on a test. School should be a time to make mistakes in a safe environment that they can learn from, not a place that they are petrified to make a mistake for fear of retribution on their grade cards. Its time to change the school system to save future students from becoming stress crazed and to let them know that there is more to this world than a grade card and in the long run it is a very small fraction of life.
Going into college everyone expects us to know what we want to do with the rest of our life. That is a huge decision to make after living only 18 years. As teenagers we can’t decide what we want to where the next day, how are we supposed to choose what we will do for the rest of our lives? With the average cost of college ranging between $8,500 for a four-year public college and $29,000 for a four-year private college per year. (College Board) Can college students afford to make the wrong decision? Shocking facts reveal that around 75 percent students will switch majors from the time they start college till their graduation day.( Freedman) This just adds more money on to the two words no one wants to hear, “Student loans.” When we finally get to graduation the excitement is short-lived with the way the economy is going now. A college degree may not be enough to land a job that will pay the bills and 6 months later we start to get the bills for that degree.