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Contemporary educational institutions are about conformity — this is evident with the rise of standardized testing — and are essentially destroying children’s abilities to engage in divergent, lateral and spontaneous thinking. In the real
world, there is hardly ever one answer to a problem. And often times, a problem is so ambiguously defined that there is no readily available answer — this is when cognitive creativity becomes an unquantifiable value.
In Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat,” he claims while people were sleeping, globalization 3.0 took place. To summarize, he postulates that a new age of globalization has occurred and irrevocably changed the global economic landscape, forever altering how we should perceive our educational apparatus.
Friedman delineates 10 “flatteners” in his book, and for brevity, I will name three: Workflow software, which allows for multiple forms of collaboration software to emerge; uploading, which consists of blogging, Wikipedia and open source software; and informing, which refers to the transformation of how people find and interact with information with the creation of Google.
Now why hasn’t our educational apparatus undergone a metamorphosis as well? It would be disingenuous to say globalization 3.0 was inconsequential, so why is our educational apparatus so resistant to evolve? Why can’t we take the next step?
The rational answer is that it is due partly to red tape, money and the inability to break away from tradition. But if we are not willing to take risks, then we are suffocating the intellectual potential and possible prowess of our younger generations and inevitably placing them in an economic quagmire.
President Barack Obama said in a speech the other day — while discussing his new $447 billion jobs plan — that the U.S. was in a “national crisis.” Well right now, I believe we are in an “educational crisis.”
Fortunately to fix this problem, we do not need Ivy League economists debating the merits of Keynesian and Austrian economics, rather we simply need to go to the source — the students. We should ask them what they want to learn, what classes should be offered, and how they want to meet their academic requirements.
The biggest failures in the educational system are the inability to realize that there is more than one path — a student should be liberated from a restrictive, standardized methodology, and understand that technology is god. As Mark Twain once said, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
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A version of this article appeared in the Sep 21 issue of the Collegiate Times.
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Good article. Just another sign of America's decline. Talk to any professor on campus who has been teaching for more than a few decades, and they will tell you that our generation is not doing half of what students used to do.
Everyone says that higher education is one of the good things this country has that others do not. It will not be long before this is not the case.
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the real problem is that too many people go to college, that it washes out the return on investment. people who could otherwise do just as well if they didn't go to college result in all of this dumbing down of education. and of course, the colleges don't care because the more people that go, the more money they get
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"So how can the U.S. become more competitive while simultaneously reducing cost per student?"
Give me back my tax money and let me teach my own child.
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