There's more than just that in there, so don't think you can get away with reading the blatherings of a tired person as substitute for the whole thing. In other news, I seem to, with this post, have hit one solid month of updating this website every day! Go me! Now to try and keep going with it, cause this is how you get better at stuff, to my knowledge. If you're interested to see what I've managed to do, have a gander about and, if you're so willing, let me know what you think. If everything goes as planned, you can expect more of the same, but different, every day at eight AM.
You're awesome, have a nice day.
Modern Education by Mackinley Clevinger, February 15, 2016
Public education began in the nineteenth century, when the United States of America and Canada began the widespread opening of schools to increase the capabilities of their citizens to work in a growing and developing world of industry and knowledge. This act of the government moved the power of education from just the rich who could afford it to everyone, a system that allowed anyone to leave their humble beginnings and do something besides the life they were born into.
This had an incredible effect on North America; a much larger citizen base now available to do the more complicated jobs involved in the factories and other venues of work that were a hallmark of the Industrial Revolution. These countries were steadily producing more, smarter people to innovate and change the rules of the world as they had existed for centuries prior, and brought us all to the kind of quality of life that seems secondhand now, but didn’t exist even a few decades ago.
Not all of us, of course; while it would be a cheery thing for everyone to innovate and change the world, that simply isn’t in the nature of many people, or within the capabilities of even more. There lies the point of education, however: To give everyone the same set of tools to do whatever they can with them. To expand their worldview and let them know that there exists a much larger and fascinating world than the world they know, and that they are free to explore it and find their own place in it, not the one expected of them by their upbringing. Education is a freeing force, one that gives everyone, regardless of origin or creed, the same opportunity to do as they will in the world we all share.
Public education, the schooling we have all been through and is an enforced requirement by law, serves this purpose to a degree. The ideology behind public school, however, began as changing an uneducated class made up of farmers’ children into drones capable of doing work in a factory. A step up in a world that was turning away from its pre-industrial roots into the one we know and enjoy today, but that idea and level of education is still the baseline everyone is cut loose into a wider world with. We can read, we can write, and we know enough about general knowledge and how to learn that we’re capable of picking up a line of work fairly easily and then advancing along those lines until we retire or die.
That is the level of education we receive from public education. That was an astronomical achievement, imparting that level of knowledge into an entire generation for the first and every time afterwards, but there’s a flaw in this plan. Public school is still preparing us for the same line of work, while society has changed a lot as a result of creating generation after generation of people who have gone further and done more than what was given by these schools, pushing us further forward into a future that has left these schools behind.
These schools still serve a vital role in educating the youth and preparing them, but the lines of thinking have changed in the past several decades. No longer are our schools preparing us, all of us, to go out and find a factory or similar-such job. Now we’re being prepared to go to University, or any other name used for a place of post-secondary education where the focus turns from generalized education to specialized education. These are not the places to learn the basics necessary for life in a modern world; these are the places where we go to reach the pinnacle of our generations’ level of intelligence and push the envelope for further generations to go further and farther, towing along society behind them. Or simply to catch up with today’s level of knowledge so we can work a job that does the world, and our pocket, some good.
There is, however, a bit of an issue with the new idea of ‘public school and then post-secondary’; it’s expensive. It is no question that a large part of the lives of students who went on to attend a college or university is the large debt that came as the price for furthering their education to modern standards. While a high school diploma was sufficient to get anyone a livable wage thirty years ago, there is a large ‘joke’ in society about how all it guarantees a graduate is a job at a fast food joint, while many of the big names of the last century that changed the world forever did so off of a high school diploma. Steve Jobs, for one, didn’t graduate from University, and he created technology we rely on every day in our social and business lives.
Just as society has moved forward, so too has the frontier of technological discovery. This isn’t the age of a garage start-up going on to become something huge; this is the age of skilled and dedicated teams of researchers working together to create the future we dream about. A high school diploma prepares a person for a work-culture that is not as large as it once was, and definitely not able to accept as many people as are trying to enter it. Many people, though, are stuck in the middle; they can’t afford a higher education, and they can’t find dependable work to support themselves or save up to go to university. Something needs to change to help these people out of this hole.
Public education has, as part of its defining features, been a free service for children across the country. You are born, you go to school, you are left to fend for yourself with the basic knowledge of life in your head if you were paying attention. Post-secondary education, due to its nature as ‘optional’ and often owned by separate groups from the government, is not a free service. In fact, in the last few decades, the price of university has been steadily rising, reaching rates that leave most children of working-class families expecting a decade or more of debt once they’re given their degree and can begin searching for work. This is not a growth due to money inflation, though. A year of tuition in the seventies would cost around one thousand dollars versus today’s thirty thousand, an incredible amount for someone who is going to be entering the job market for the first time with, for a four-year course, over one hundred thousand dollars owed to the bank already.
There is something that many counties around the world do, but North America has been hesitant to follow. Downright resistant, in fact, to the detriment of new generations crippled by student debt. Many countries in Europe, and in others around the world, do not charge students for post-secondary education. They understand that a vital part in living and doing something in today’s world comes from these institutions, that the world we live in is more complicated than what public school prepares us for, and as such have done something to help their citizens get established and be more capable of advancing their and the world’s society along. They do not want to see their new generation of hopefuls be crushed by institutionalized debt and a lack of higher education out of fear for the aforementioned debt, and instead offer this service to their youth so that society does not stagnate because the affixed price tag is too pricy for it to be worth the trouble.
There are lifestyles that exist outside of those helped along by post-secondary education, but for many it serves as the path that will lead them where they want to go, and it is no question that society needs doctors, teachers, lawyers, and any other profession that maintains the status quo while others work at changing it into something better for us all. We live in a society maintained by professions that require a university degree, and yet no action has been taken by the American or Canadian government to make it more affordable for a public that will not be able to pay the outrageous costs which leave them in debt for years to follow their eventual departure from these places.
A post-secondary education is important on both an intellectual and social standpoint. It’s another step between young people and being fully cut off and on their own in life, preparing them for the day all safety nets are removed. It’s a place to find your passion and advance your understanding of it, to become a master in the field you’ve selected for yourself. It’s a place to meet like-minded or completely different people, to experience life and have the opportunity to experiment with your life in ways you never could back at home. It’s the first taste of true freedom for many, and it has served its purpose of furthering the education of generation after generation for countless years. University, college, or whatever you like to call it; it shouldn’t be a privilege to be given a modern education. It should be a right given to everyone.