Education Today

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People have learned to rely on schools to provide the proper education necessary to succeed: become an independent thinker. Although schools do what they are designed to do, they do not give a complete. Instead they train students to work, and teach students that there is nothing outside of one’s “cubicle.”
Mark Edmundson exposes this problem in “On the Uses of Liberal Education”. He states “colleges turned to energetic promotional strategies to fill the empty chair. And suddenly college became a buyer’s market” describing college as a commercialized workplace (Edmundson, 6). Edmundson writes “Colleges don’t have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing department.” (Edmundson, 6) Students are the consumers in this business, receiving their education from professors: fulfilling the role of suppliers. In the business of education, degrees are sold to the students for their tuition and work. This makes most students take only goal-oriented classes that lead to degrees. This takes away from the students getting a complete education: becoming an independent thinker, by ignoring the humanities. “English and history have to contend for students against the more success-insuring branches, such as the sciences and commerce school.” States Edmundson. (Edmundson, 6) Students in this business-like education system aspire for a degree that will provide the highest paying job. Most students aspire to have a math or science degree. This entire consumer-driven attitude towards schooling makes the students have a strategic mindset with one major goal, learned through the study of Math and Science. While math and science is a big part of education, humanities are equally as important. The humanities are what sets humans apart from machine...

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... has prospered for thousands of years. Ignoring them can have catastrophic effects on the coming generations, and even the survival of the human race.
Overall Johnson implies that education is the ability to use math and science and that the content (humanities) can be ignored. This statement has major issues because education is more than just math and science, education also consists of the humanities. These problems with Johnson’s statement are shown by Edmundson and Slouka, they show how people with Johnson-like mentality believe only in the importance of math and science and leave the humanities behind. That is why the humanities are losing their funding, losing their value and losing their place in education. In conclusion the humanities should never be ignored because they teach humans the morals and ethics, which set humans apart from all other species.

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