The Future of American Education

my latest paper that is due today....its what I get for writing a paper at 11:30 at night!!! Don't you just love professors that give you 2 days to write a stupid paper:S UGH!!


The future of American education is not looking very bright; instead it is just going downhill. I am more inclined to agree with Caroline Bird in her essay “Where College Fails Us” when she explains how it is becoming near worthless to attend college in order to get a better job or a better life. We need to want to attend for reasons of more worth to us than just going because our parents or counselors “encourage” us to. All our hard work and money is going down the drain the longer the authorities in our lives push us toward something of little or no value to us. Today if you go in to get a job you find you were being lied to all along. We have been told we have to go to college when in reality for most jobs you barely need a high school education as long as you know the right people and are experienced.

According to Plato in his “Allegory of the Cave”, “ …certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes”(185). It does not matter how much a teacher tries to teach a person but if that person is not capable of learning, time is just wasting away and doing neither of them any good. We are supposed to share what we learn and if we do, not everyone is going to need to spend money to fall asleep in lecture halls, the knowledge will be passed on in a much more practical way. In the way that I understand it, Plato goes on to explain that not every person is cut out to attend college but that does not mean they are stupid, it merely means that their place is out in the world working with their hands more.

Teachers, however, do not what this to be common knowledge. They do not want us to know that they cannot teach all students and that their capabilities are limited. Instead they mislead us into thinking it is the only way to succeed in life, the only way we can amount to anything and be accepted into society. In her essay “Where College Fails Us”, Caroline Bird had the point when she states, “We’ve been told that young people have to go to college because our economy can’t absorb an army of untrained 18-year olds. But disillusioned graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained 22-year olds either”(199). It does not make a difference what we do with our time, we are never going to be fully accepted into the old fashioned work force. We have to create our own future with what we gained from life experiences because the education system is not going to help us.

If this attitude from the education system keeps up, there is not going to be anything left for our children and their children when they apply themselves to obtain an education. If we are being taught things that do not matter, and it is bound to get worse , the future for education is looking pretty bleak. There is nothing new being offered and when it is, the system just throws it away because they are scared of change. They do not want to accept that maybe their ways are wrong for this generation. There is mainly arguing between the different styles of teaching and neither side is stopping to think about what is best for the student. Who cares if we study white or black literature? It does not matter to us anymore, so just stop arguing about it! The only this that matters is that these people wake up from their dream world and realize that there are people out in the world that want to live a life of meaning, and it does not always have to be in a classroom. You would think these teachers would want to help louis vuitton handbags, it is why they went into that career in the first place. But as time passes and nothing is done about helping a young adult obtain his/her true goals, we realize that there is a slow leakage of brain cells among the people in authority of the education system. American education is becoming meaningless, and will continue to become meaningless until someone sticks their head out and takes a stand against whoever is making our college education so worthless, which would be the government. There is really no future for American education unless this happens because if it is this bad now we are really going to be screwed down the road.


Works Cited


Bird, Caroline. “Where College Fails Us”
Writing on the River: An Anthology for Composition 1 at Chattanooga State
Technical Community College. Eds. English Faculty and Staff at Chattanooga
State Technical Community College.Boston: McGraw-Hill;2007: 199-207.

Plato. “The Allegory of the Cave”
Writing on the River: An Anthology for Composition 1 at Chattanooga State
Technical Community College. Eds. English Faculty and Staff at Chattanooga
State Technical Community College.Boston: McGraw-Hill;2007: 181-188.