Professor Deresiewicz and Professor Edmundson discuss what professors are teaching kids today in college. They believe that colleges are just going for the main stream approach to teaching. Both professors think this is a negative aspect because then most students aren’t taught to question the system and think for themselves.
Professor Deresiewicz and Professor Edmundson believe that the students in colleges for the most part can be divided into two categories; thinkers and leaders. The leaders are the students the colleges seek to breed, the students who will get out of colleg and make lots of money so that the alumni can send it back to their colleges. The thinkers are the students that question what the colleges are teaching and whether it is worthwhile. Even though it is not actually black and white like that, most students will always question the establishment to a certain degree. Some will even drop out of their college because they do not find any answers to their big questions there.
I agree with many of the criticisms made by professor Deresiewicz and Professor Edmundson about modern colleges. Students should not just be taught how to follow a certain career path in order to make the most amount of money. They should be taught how to follow less traveled and less safe paths or perhaps make their own paths in their careers as well. Students may even possibly become more successful if they can think for themselves and even more so if they have considered the big questions in life.
But what are the big questions? How do I spend my life meaningfully, might be one. This question when answered could lead a person to do many various things. They could still follow the same career path as everyone else but start a family and create meaning in their life in that way. Or they could ditch their formal education and join the Peace Corps in order to help less fortunate people and bring meaning to their life in that way. Better yet they might be able to figure out how to use their formal education to help even more people in more useful ways. That is a way that learning about the big questions can help you out in life.
Professor Deresiewics brings up how in the 19th century colleges were religious institutions. They were not just businesses trying to make money and look more prestigious like they are now. When they had masses for the students, they could actually get the students to think about all of the hard questions presented to them in life. This was not only true because the institutions were religious, the reason colleges asked those questions back then and not now is because back when colleges were first created it was not all about the money. Colleges back then just strove to give their students a higher education than they could achieve by themselves.
Colleges today care more about image than anything when they look at what they will teach their students. The main goal is to be one of the best colleges at teaching kids how to make lots of money so they can charge lots of money for the education they provide. They more money they make the “better” education they can provide. It is to some extent a vicious cycle that looks like it will not find a solution anytime soon.
The corruption by money is the main reason that the colleges do not normally ask the big questions to their students anymore. If you ask your students whether their education is worthwhile they might just find out that it isn’t for them and drop out to do something that is to them more worthwhile. If they ask their students if they think it is meaningful to go out and follow the same career paths millions have before them to make more money, they might not think so and go out and make less money.
Those are things that colleges have become afraid of and because of their fear they have taken away the much higher education that they used to teach to the students. Students used to leave colleges and feel prepared for their lives. Now they leave and feel prepared to work. This is something colleges need to strive to fix for their students. They have to trust that student’s will still want to pay for an education that will not just teach them how to make money but also help them to learn how to live.
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I like that you spend a paragraph investigating what the big questions might be. I think you should also address how a university might go about instituting the big questions in its curriculum, if that’s even possible.
The paragraph about religious institutions ends up more summarizing than offering your insightful perspective.
The money corruption paragraph is good, but shouldn’t that come right after the What the Big Questions are paragraph?
Overall, cut down on the summarizing and come up with more powerful and more frequent ideas. I think if you boiled this down to your own ideas, you’d only be left with a paragraph or two. Condense, condense.
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