Thoughts on Education

I wrote this for my English class           

 

            Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed people are inherently good-natured, caring, and inquisitive creatures.  He felt that our education systems taught children to become useful to society, but that they stifled true learning and the natural methods of enlightenment.  Rousseau’s writings and thoughts have influenced thousands of people but have not had a considerable impact upon the way education is run in America.  America’s education system is the very kind of systematic, institutionalized sort of anti-learning organization Rousseau was writing about in the eighteenth century. 

            Education has become a stifling system of monotonous and tedious routines executed over and over again and repeated until one has given up on their absurdity or either endured the anathema right up until they are given their hard earned right to be come over-qualified and under-paid.  A truly fantastic system for encouraging learning!  From personal experience, I know that we are taught how to glean facts from selected readings and learn what the state has decided is prudent for our societal development, we are not taught how to formulate our own ideas, nor are we stressed the importance of self education.  The autodidactic learner died with our founding fathers.  Today we are a nation of ignorant, illiterate people dependent upon others to tell us what to believe, and this is the result of years and years of an educational system that rivals the creativity of, well….insert inanimate object here. 

            Rousseau suggested a form of education that nurtured to children’s natural tendencies to explore and ask questions.  He felt that forcing them to sit still in rows and be quiet while they were spoken to was against their already reliably probing personalities.  This is very true, people should not abhor learning, but because of the way in which we are exposed to ‘learning’ most people do.  I have learned so much more on my own accord than I have ever learned in a classroom, it makes me furious.  By the time I was in high school I was pointing out spelling and other grammatical errors in my English teachers’ lessons. Go America.

            Of course, there are teachers who do their best to give their students an experience the likes of which would make Rousseau proud, but their efforts are limited by the impositions of the state.  Impositions which are made perhaps with the best of intentions, perhaps not, but either way, their effects have wreaked havoc upon the cumulative intelligence of the world’s people and their posterity.  Questioning the status quo has always been the impetus behind the most revolutionary changes of society.  Sadly, I believe there are a dwindling number of people who challenge the effectiveness and motives behind popular education. 

            If one were to ask ten ambitious academics at any prestigious school in the country why they have applied themselves so assiduously to their work, I would wager that nine of them would tell you “so I can get a good job”.  That is perhaps the root of our problem, people dedicate themselves to earning good grades (whatever the hell those represent) in order to get into a respected and venerable college, and once there they slave over their work like passionless robots until they have powered through years of toil and torture.  Upon graduation they use their degree to finally procure for themselves a job with a respectable salary, or perhaps they go to law school, or medical school, of course for fiscal reasons once more.  It is love of money, not learning that propels the ‘exemplary’ student forward, it is not honorable perseverance nor demonstration of work ethic, it is vanity.  

            Albert Einstein was a poor student, and a tremendous learner, as was Rousseau and countless other writers and artists.  Education is another extension of the superfluous appendages hanging from the dead tree of society.  There is no truth in it, there is no progress, there is regress, and for the thinking, impassioned individual of the mind there is a long arduous struggle against an unseen entity.