The Educational System – Why Should I Conform to What You Want?

I was a university student, and as most university students got a slap of reality when I started. I used to think that the educational system was this beautiful experience that I will have and cherish for the rest of my life, but soon after my entry to the higher educational system I realized that all my expectations were false.

The educational system is supposed to widen our perspective on life, and future. But all it did was conform us to machines that record and then play, where the information fed to us is usually unquestionable. The university professor is considered to most students as the tyrant that is standing between them and their education.

Now don’t get me wrong, I can’t blame professors, they have a lot of points backing them up, for example, an average undergraduate professor has 2-4 classes to teach, and in those classes an average of 50-100 students in each class, this will undoubtedly cause the professor to loose track -and even loose interest- of his students, and does the teaching as a job. This will decrease the creativity and ambition of the professor which will cause the students to loose the interest and drive to continue their educational path.

With that said, professors sometimes are mandated to teach classes or the funding for their research, lab, or experiments will be cut, so, the professors have no choice but to teach the class -even if I can’t count what they do sometimes as teaching- and get their funding.

If I ask “is this the way learning should be?” I would get a lot of answers ranging between yes, and no, including the “we did it, you should do it to”. But is that a reasonable answer?

In the movie Accepted an interesting definition for education was stated: “The true purpose of education is to stimulate the creativity and the passions of the student body.” With that definition, I truly believe that most -if not all- educational systems have greatly failed. As students our creativity and passion is anything but stimulated, I have noticed that we as students have been robbed of our experience, instead we were conformed to caffeine fueled stressed out robots.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you shouldn’t attend university, it is a very important necessity in this day and age, but, consider this when you (or someone else) are bragging about your education.

-HamadJ