College Education Flaws

Martin Luther King, Jr., an American minister, activist, and leader in the Civil Rights Movement, once said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” King is pointing out that education is meant to challenge people in order to shape their minds and thoughts. The importance of education has been written about countless times. Many intelligent writers have written articles on higher education, such as Horace Mann’s “From Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1848,” Jean Anyon’s “From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work,” and John Taylor Gatto’s “Against School.” In their writings they point out the flaws in the
These writers set the stage for what people should look for in education and the flaws that we should fix. Andrew Delbanco, director of the American studies program and Julian Clarence Levi Professor in Humanities since 1995 at Columbia University, is another author who writes on higher education. Delbanco’s 2012 “College at Risk” article builds off these authors’ philosophies to write about the purpose and flaws in modern day college. Delbanco illustrates the purpose of college while pointing out the flaws of college today to show the importance of college education, which builds off other authors’ stances on education.
Delbanco argues that the purpose of college is to learn how to make decisions, challenge your views and expand your our knowledge of others to find yourself. A key claim that he points out is how American culture differentiates from this by extending their childhoods, he writes, “In America there has been an impulse to slow things down, to extend the time for second chances and defer the day when determinative choices must be made” (Delbanco 221). He supports his claim with this slippery slope of how young adults cannot make decisions due to society’s view that their childhood should be expanded. The premise is that true
A key claim about the flaws in the education system is how it tries to compare all the students through standardization: “As strategy emerges in more detail for holding colleges accountable for cost and quality, we need to keep in mind that standardized tests… are simply incapable of measuring the qualities that should be the fruits of a true liberal education: creativity, wisdom, humility, and insight into ethical as well as empirical questions” (Delbanco 225). His reasoning is that standardization ruins creativity and the importance of moral as well as emotional education. He later supports his claim by saying that standardization compares students who have completely different experiences and learn differently, which sends a message that all people all need to be alike and are simply just numbers. The premise is that the audience favors liberal arts colleges, which allows for a well-rounded education in all aspects, such as creativity. He uses the strategic move of listing all the important aspects that standardization does not include, showing that it limits the students’ education. The rule of justice is that there is no known way to measure students and compare them without thinking of them simply as an object. When he says, “fruits of a true liberal education,” he uses this figurative language to emphasize the importance of liberal education and