Analysis of Education in the Current Generation

Jeffery Chong

Professor M. Dolan

EN 101

13th April 2016

An analysis of education in the current generation

The importance of education is unquestionably clear. Education is the key role to being involved and to function in our complex society. Education also offers an environment where societal and cultural values are simultaneously developed. However, the schooling system today is not quite capable of providing such values and has to be improved on many places, as everyone knows. Too often our schools are places where instead of learning how to think, students are taught and told to obey orders. There is no place where this crisis is more acute than in the inner-city schools of our major cities. Schools that barely merit the title, “school.”

In Gatto’s essay “Why Schools Don’t Educate”, he states that schools no longer educate students the way they should. He believes that schools don’t teach anything but how to obey orders and notwithstanding the efforts of countless human caring teachers. Gatto’s statement portrayed today’s education system thoroughly. Schools no longer encourage students to learn, they intend to produce average students whose behavior can be easily predicted and controlled. On the other hand, students spend too much time staying in school and that isolates them. How can we possibly think that changing one variable, time spent in school, will have any meaningful effect on student’s achievement or life in or out of school? As usual, when we get into the envy game of comparing sizes (of achievement scores, for instance), we fail to consider the whole context.

Most schools want its’ students to be obedient and fully devoted to our academics to generate a result of good scores and most likely open up doors to brighter future. Teachers definitely play an important role in this specific aspect. Teachers might be making students spend more time in school, handing out heavier workloads of assignments or having more exams,...