Where is Your Money really Going?

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?

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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.

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