Education

Will Tunis
Persuasive essay
Advanced Composition
November 15 2007
Institutionalized Education

I believe that the institutionalization of education is destroying the minds of our youth because it encourages competition, classification of people as smart or dumb, and is taking away our self reliance and self realization. Day after day we sit in a room with our peers and we are pitted against one another for who can get the better 100% that seemingly implies who will be dominant or subordinate in the future. Also this grade or quality you strive to obtain seems to infer the quality of your mind, so when it isn’t achieved one might feel stupid or inferior to another which causes feelings of resentment and segregation.

When I say institutionalized I mean we sit in rooms that are close to identical plus or minus a few minor details, and try to learn different things in a very similar fashion. This is a foolish approach. I say foolish because some things are very different and should be treated so. Take history and science for example. To sit and read and write notes that are essentially facts, which is what science is and then to teach history in the same manner is absurd. History is a story that represents morals that we as a culture need to prosper and grow to avoid mistakes we have already made in the past. So when history is viewed from a factual view the moral is lost and there-for the importance.

So many Children think they are stupid because they are classified according to someone else’s standards. This is foolish because different people learn in different ways and institutionalizing forces everyone to learn in the same way. People need to learn things differently. For example some people learn when there are visual aids others from books. Now I fully understand that there are not and probably never will be enough teachers to teach everyone in there own personal way. But this leads me to my next point.

People are capable of learning on there own. People have been doing and finding out what to do in life on their own for thousands of years. Only recently have we started institutionalizing everything. This boring repetitive notion that you need someone to hold your hand throughout every activity you do is a modern day myth. Think about it we sit in rooms all day long with supervision and even have to ask to leave. Can I go to the bathroom? Can I get a drink of water? Can I? Can? Can I? Well you can regardless of what they tell you but they will try to make you feel out of the norm if you do. When In reality excreting wastes, eating, and drinking are about the most normal thing one can do. And then after you dehydrate yourself while holding in a crap all day long they have the nerve to give you home work. Which seemingly implies that whatever you had planner to do wasn’t good enough and then they check the next day so they can monitor what you did while you should have had time to yourself.

The point of my message is not to hurt you teachers out there. But that you yourselves are already institutionalized and should step back and take a good look at what is really going on. So I say to everyone, the time for action is at hand. We need less people thinking the same about different things and more people thinking differently about the same things so we can stop making mistakes over the same issues that we have been getting wrong throughout the course of history.