Legend’s VIEW
Education:
What is its current value?
So much is happening in our world today. It’s getting hard to keep up with it all. But it’s Safe to say we are or at least should be in a period of reevaluation. In our personal lives and as a whole society. One area in specific that deserves a lot of that attention is our educational institutions. And because we are at a college, I am specifically referring to higher education.
After all, it’s the one place that is designed with the very purpose of helping us dissect the world around us. Henry Giroux, a university professor in Canada and also a leading critic on public pedagogy, insists that a proper higher education is one that “demands a critical and engaged interaction with the world we live in mediated by a responsibility for challenging structures of domination and for alleviating human suffering.”
Unfortunately, values of this kind appear to have been lost and on a further decline. Nowadays it seems like school serves a different kind of purpose; a more perverted one. It’s like being able to say you have been to school is more important than what you actually learned while you were there. It’s also primarily seen as something that will get you ahead in the race for social and economic power.
This is not okay, especially in such complicated times like we are in now. But it has somehow been normalized and indoctrinated in all of our minds.Some have gone as far as trying to mandate this attitude towards education. For instance, back in 2015, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker objected “search for truth” as the university’s mission statement and instead preferred that the goal and mission for the university be to meet “the states work force needs.”
Where are we headed as a society if we eliminate search for truth. Alternative truths? Entertainment is another factor that is interfering with the significance of a true education. The multi billion dollar sports complex backed by the NCAA encourages an abandonment of education.
In his book “Beer and Circus,” Murray Sperber includes accounts from students at many of the most popular universities who admit that the school’s basketball or football team played a significant role in their decision to attend the particular college. An actual education takes a back seat to everything else in this culture and the result can become more unhealthy than it already is if we don’t reverse it. The value of education must be restored to it’s proper position if we expect a prosperous future.
