Education In The New Millennium

I originally wrote this piece roughly four months ago. I think it is entirely applicable. So do enjoy my reproduction of ...

Education In The New Millennium

I have been meaning to post this one for about two weeks now. Finally getting around to it, hoping that it will give you all some food for thought.

The incident that inspired this piece happened all the way back on September 10th, when the semester was still fairly young. It resonated within me so much that early the next morning I felt compelled to write about it. Since some of the details contained below could identify the persons mentioned, I sought their respective permissions before putting this piece out for public scrutiny. I hope that it does not fall on deaf ears, including those of my fellows students (and lecturers) at COSTAATT.

  

One of my close friends and fellow student at COSTAATT seems to have a problem. She is nearing her time to graduate and, as most graduating students are, she has some concern about her GPA and the class of degree she will shortly obtain. The particular reason for her concern is one of the final courses that she now has to complete; a course that she must pass to graduate.

The course is one that I happen to have already completed. I did not find it a difficult prospect but I have been told that my knowledge and life experience disqualifies me from being representative of the average student. What I can say is that the lecturer for the course uses a marking system that has little room for flexibility, in that your assigned grade tends to unfailingly show your true proficiency (or lack thereof) in the rules, comprehension and use of the English language.

Barely two weeks into the new semester, my friend’s concern is that in her first of a dozen weekly assignments, of which the best five will be used to generate her coursework mark, she has received a grade that COSTAATT’s deems an F. Her immediate concern, as mentioned above, is that she is about to graduate and she does not want this course to pull down her GPA and next thing you know she doesn’t graduate with first class honours.

While I am not dismissive of her concern – who doesn’t want to graduate with the highest class of degree achievable – I am a bit disheartened by her approach to the course at hand because I sincerely doubt that the lecturer is at fault. During my time with the course, the instructions for the weekly assignments were made very clear by the lecturer, including the rubric that will be used to assess these weekly assignments. In addition to this, the lecturer prepares a sample response for each assignment, so that the students have a comparative example to gauge their progress towards an optimal level. As an aside, I will mention that I have been fortunate enough to have produced an effort that supplanted that lecturer’s as the ideal response to one of the assignments (hooray for me!).

My disheartenment lies with my friend’s attitude towards the assessment of her first assignment. I would think that, knowing that the lecturer is not known to be unfair or to have had some adverse history with her, she should view the grade she received as a clarion call to improve. Clearly, her work in this assignment was less than spectacular, so she should learn from whatever errors were made and seek to improve in the subsequent assignments. Isn’t that what she is here at COSTAATT to do? Isn’t learning the true purpose of education?

In my opinion, I fear that too many of the students at COSTAATT are in a predicament of their own making, like my friend. For them, "I" am here at COSTAATT to earn a degree; actually accepting and acquiring knowledge is an incidental but purely optional benefit. Their emphasis is on developing or using some formula through which they will sail through COSTAATT without having to learn anything or really apply themselves. This formula includes the careful selection of ‘soft’ lecturers with whom good grades with minimum effort (or real learning) are guaranteed. Even to the point of withdrawing from or deferring courses that the ‘hard’ lecturer is teaching until the ‘soft’ one becomes available.

As for me, I can say in COSTAATT that I have never used the hard/soft criterion in choosing the courses I have to do. I, for one, am fully aware of my capabilities and feel that I should do well in whatever class I am enrolled in. That’s right: whatever class with whoever happens to teach it. And that is not arrogance; that is confidence. A confidence that we all should have when facing our academic challenges. A confidence that we are going to apply ourselves to the best of our abilities. A confidence that, with every classroom session, we are going to learn something that we didn’t know before – even things we never knew we never knew. And the additional benefit of the feeling you get when you earn your good grade.

So, my fellow students, I encourage you to abandon this mercenary approach to education that too many of you have taken. Open yourself up to the business of actually learning instead, accepting that higher academia requires some self-improvement as well. When you truly learn, those good grades you crave will come too, with the benefit of understanding the world around you and how it really works. Otherwise, you’ll find that after all this ‘education’ you won’t ever be really ready to find your place and space in this world.

Let me know what you think!