Gabrielle Hunt - Alternative 1

Gabrielle Hunt

2 April 2012

Alternative Topic 1

Education

                In class (2 April) we started off on a tangent about the educational system today compared with past systems. While students used to be expected to know particular books and scholars by heart, now we’re expected to balance five separate classes all with their own subjects and homework and expected memorization. Rather than focusing on the sole area of our interest, we have things like the “liberal learning curriculum” that insist we take classes covering a wide range of topics. In some ways, scholarship has become a capitalist affair: we pay for classes, hold information in our brains long enough to spit it out for the test, and after enough repetitions we’ll be given a piece of paper with our name on it. How does this impact our “real life,” after graduation? How does it impact the people we become?

                As a tutor for the Athletic Department here on campus, I see the effects of this system with almost every student I work with, particularly when it comes to math classes. In essence, I see students learning what to think about, but not how to think. We can walk through a calculus problem one piece at a time, but the moment anything about that problem changes (for example, if they’re told to find a different piece of the problem as their final answer or are given different parts of the problem from which to derive other pieces), it’s like something brand new that they’ve never seen before. It’s next to impossible to figure out from the problem a) what kind of a problem they’re looking at/what potential tools they’ll need, b) what they have, c) what they need to find d) what the final answer will be.

                I don’t think our current educational style is worse than previous ones, but there are some things that simply must be taught, and aren’t there (though in all fairness, these are more present at CNU than they were at any of my old schools) in the current system. Logic is not something that can be BS-ed. I’ve heard students complain that they’re “never going to use this,” and while that may be a valid complaint about some classes (I won’t name disciplines), understanding and being able to use the logical process is essential if we are to be “empowered human beings.”