Live And Learn Menand Summary

Preview: Menand’s article “Live and Learn” covers the idea of the educational system and higher education. Trying to answer the question: what is the most appropriate system for higher education? He answers this first by describing three theories that higher education runs off. The first is that education should be ran by the book and by a grading scale, the second is using the pass fail incentive, and the third and, the most important to our modern society, is the ideal that college is more for specialized jobs. By looking at ideals one and two, we see the system of education used post World War II. This system that uses grades both as a scale and as an incentive has encouraged the youth of the United States for the last fifty years. However, upon the recent times we have come to require specialized jobs, and due to this higher education has changed. Now we see higher education specializing students for future careers such as doctors and lawyers, where one does not broaden their experience.
Menand also mentions
In his twelfth paragraph he talks about how education use to follow the genetically tree of those who had attended before and how after 1940 we begin to see these numbers decrease and students begin to enter based on intelligence, causing another transition in the piece. In his thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth paragraph we see an increase in competiveness for Ivy League colleges and a more open availability of higher education to the masses. This in paragraph sixteen and seventeen we see how both theories one and two react to this seeing how it degrades the system and the other having issues with the competition for top-tier colleges. In paragraph eighteen and nineteen we see how valuable an education is financially and why people would want a higher education as well as how the demand for Americanized higher education is on the