School Vs. Education By Russell Baker And The Human Cost Of An Illiterate Society

With the help of technology and changes in society, modern means of education are rapidly changing, making it much easier for students to learn and access more resources for learning. In the stories "School vs. Education" by Russell Baker and "The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society" by Jonathan Kozol they both explain the worth of education and the way life would be without it. This essay will suggest that technology has changed the way the world is and how things are taught and if technology had never been apart of society and everyday life than we would be a lot less intelligent than we are now. With a loss of intelligence, so many things would not have been invented. Technology is ever changing therefore in some ways technology is making

Having more information being accessible for students, would mean better education. In the story "School vs Education" by Russell Baker, the author claims that we do some of our most important learning before the education stage of our lives. "By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American education and be ready to enter school"(Baker 1). He believes the only point of education in schooling is to get students through the "testing stage". He said "Early in this stage, the child learns that he is either dumb or smart. If the teacher puts intelligent demands upon the child, the child learns he is smart. If the teacher expects little of the child, the child learns he is dumb and soon quits bothering to tell the testers what they want to hear."(Baker 7). With technology updating all the time, it makes it easier to learn new things and to become more intelligent. Which would make the authors word irrelevant because teachers wouldn’t be the ones deciding if the child was intelligent or not. If they did decide a student was dumb or unintelligent, that student would have the opportunity to prove that teacher wrong, with the opportunity to learn more information

The skills students must have, have to update when the way people learn is updated. The skills students used to have to have is being able to read, write, and speak the English language properly. If they can 't do these simple tasks, then they are considered illiterate. If you are illiterate in today 's society then you can 't live simply in society. In the story "Human Cost of an Illiterate Society" by Jonathan Kozol, the author wrote "Illiterates cannot read instructions on a bottle of prescription medicine. They cannot find out when a medicine is past the year of safe consumption: nor can they read of allergenic risks, warnings to diabetics, or the potential sedative effect of certain kinds of non prescription pills."(Kozol 116). This is just an example of some of the basic things that illiterates cannot do, from the perspective of the author. But now regular everyday people need to know how to use a computer, how to use a telephone, how to do your taxes online, how to google. Most jobs these days involve using a computer. So including having to have the skills of reading, writing, and speaking. You also have to know how to type and if you are illiterate, you will not know how to type. Therefore technology has changed the skills we need to