What happened to America and the American Dream? There was a time when someone could achieve anything with hard work. This is no longer the case. The job market has become so competitive we must rely on luck or personal connections to land a job. Recent graduates often enter the world without experience or real training. They quickly discover how difficult survival can be, especially with student loans to pay off.
So what went wrong? What made our society fall so far, so fast: Was it Wall Street, our involvement in the Middle East, or simply irresponsible spending by our government? While all of these factors contributed to the demise of our economy, the true culprit, and the issue we may never overcome, is public education.
Public education was designed to provide every American with an opportunity for success. Instead, it has robbed us of that very opportunity. With public education came standardized testing and with standardized testing came the death of creativity in the classroom. However, the problems reach deeper than the impact felt in classes.
Public education created a job market for teachers. There was a time when people had a legitimate passion for teaching. This passion led to a career in education. Now people become educators to pay the bills.
Students, however, are not without blame. Before public education, students placed greater value on their education. Value was placed on the knowledge gained, not the degree received.
During the 12 years of an average person’s education, teachers convince their students a college degree is a prerequisite for success. Therefore graduates flooded universities with applications, forcing the institutions to use statistics to determine admissions. Students are now admitted based on GPAs and SAT/ACT scores, factors that provide little information about the personal character of an applicant. These newly admitted students are not in college for knowledge, but for the same reason they went to high school, because they were told they had to. A college degree is now a means to an end, not valued for what it is, but for what it can get you. Classrooms are filled with students who aren’t in class to learn, and led by professors who aren’t there to teach.
There are students who care significantly about their education, just as there are exceptional teachers. But haven’t we all endured a class from a lackluster teacher? Can you really say you leave every class with a greater understanding? Aren’t we all guilty at one point of focusing on our grade rather than the knowledge we gained?
So what do we do? We stop relying on our professors.
We live in a time where information is everywhere and we have uninterrupted access to thoughts, ideas and discoveries from people throughout the globe. Spend an hour on the Internet conducting research and compare what you learn to an hour spent in the classroom.
We should use our professors to verify what we learn in our own time. We should treat them as consultants, not prophets.
Some say that Internet sources lack credibility. Yet what credentials do our professors really have? While some have years of experience, if they have been out of the field for a decade the world they worked in no longer exists. Other professors only have a college degree. Now what is the real value of a degree? We all know of someone who did well in class, earned their degree and headed off to the workforce only to return to school later in need of further education. They were forced to come back because the value we place on our education is disproportionate to the value employers place on that same education. If our degree isn’t enough to get us a job, should a degree be enough to make our teachers’ words doctrine?
Yes, a degree still holds value, but only because it is a societal expectation, not because it guarantees any tangible benefits. We must all take responsibility for our own education. No professor, classmate or adviser should value our education more than we do. We need to conduct our own research and make knowledge the priority, not grades. This is our only opportunity to create separation from the crowd. This is how we achieve our goals, and how we achieve the American Dream.