With students nowadays, there’s a constant strive towards creating the perfect information spewing machine. What about building a person? A young adult?
There are a select few teens and young adults who manage to be born built to absorb information like a sponge and spit it back out like a broken printer, but the vast majority of students don’t have this abnormal gift and can’t handle the stresses of it. There’s a demand for adults in the work force with experience– fewer and fewer employers want to see hefty college degrees and more with experience in fields which they need education to get into. The paradox only works to continue the impossible realm of excluding “abnormal learners” from entering into fields that genuinely interest them.
I feel comfortable asserting that the vast majority of teachers get into the profession not for the pay, but rather for the love of a subject they want to impart upon the youth of the U.S. I feel that English is an incredible subject with the power to change the lives and futures of countless youth. But with an education system that is geared towards creating uniform children who ‘don’t get left behind’, the vast majority are getting left behind. Memorization works wonders on kids under intense amounts of pressure to be the exact same as the student next to them.
Professor John Boyer of Virginia Tech gave an interesting TED talk regarding this very dilemma in today’s education system. Take the time to watch it, he’s surely got a point.