What Is The Future Of Education By Mark Edmundson

The education system is not what it should be and often mistakes schooling as getting an education. The education system attempts to make students learn through drilling and training to grasp information. They force students to do repetitive work and memorize information. What the system should be doing is allowing students to question ideologies and make discoveries. “Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here? A Word to the Incoming Class,” an essay by Mark Edmundson, addresses how hard it is to get a real education in a degree monetary based society. People are using minimal effort to get by to reach their goal; a decent paying job. The education system needs an update. People need to stop thinking about the financial prospects the future may
He was almost a victim of choosing money over his heart’s desire too. In his essay, Edmundson tells a story about how he was going to study pre-law in college and how his father convinced him otherwise. His father told him that “[he] was going to college only once, and that while [he] was there [he] better study what [he] wanted” (406). This story can be applied to many college students today. They want to use college as a stepping stone to have better fortune in the future whether their major makes them happy or not. In today’s society, money is used to value success over happiness and it can get students to study majors just for the high income even when the work is draining. Edmundson points out that society encourages people to do what they deem useful even if the field is not cut out for them (414). Undergraduates should study what excites them because they will be more likely to retain information than when they are in a field they don’t particularly care for. Trying to learn the information can be a begrudging task when one is not interested. Studying for self-fulfillment can improve one’s drive, work would not feel like a chore, and who says people can’t earn a decent amount of money doing what they
As Edmundson put it, “people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast” (408). Stuart Rojstaczer, the writer of “Grade Inflation Gone Wild,” adds to this idea by commenting “when students walk into a classroom knowing that they can go through the motions and get a B+ or better, that’s what they tend to do, give minimal effort” (Greene and Lidinsky 109). This needs to come to an end. Real learning is not being achieved through this process. By “learning” in this manner, the student’s grades might go up, but the work put in does not reflect the grade the student achieved or the amount of knowledge they hold. But, it is hard to make students put in more effort when the teacher doesn’t give their course the attention they need either. Teachers don’t want to be bothered with angry students, so they give out grades that some people do not deserve. Professors rather give students what they want than to “[face] the wrath of students for whom entitlement begins with the letter A,” as Phil Primack put it in his essay titled “Doesn’t Anybody Get a C Anymore” (Greene and Lidinsky 110). Teachers should make their students push themselves so that they are able to learn