According to Freire, education (well at least our system) is a huge cycle of memorizing and regurgitating useless information. I couldn’t agree more with the subject. As the world around us has changed in the past 100 years, education has pretty much stayed the same. I always had a feeling in school that what I was learning needed purpose. You can’t just learn for the sake of learning. You learn because you want to acquire that skill. Many people go to college and receive great higher education, but they are only there for the degree and the information that they learn from most other classes is useless. Most students I know don’t take Gen-Eds as seriously as other classes, because we have been taught that the degree matters more than the information. High school has been warped into a useless bunch of years to train you to conform to the normal, and college is just a means to an end. If you are taking a class on Spanish, you don t take it because you need more money, you take it because you want to learn Spanish. Now that our system has oversimplified the process and definition of “learning”, we will forever be taking classes for material gain, and not for the knowledge we actually need. It is a huge problem in the mental state of America. Our students get filled with extra knowledge they don’t need, and what they actually want to learn gets overlooked because they don’t need to learn it, they just need to have to get a good grade, and a piece of paper that says they know the information. America has lost its own merit. They call it higher education but the system hasn’t risen to meet its own standards yet.
Oversimplification
Square
Your post does a fantastic job of describing the capitalistic soul-purge that ‘higher’ education has become in the United States. No longer is university a grounds for discovery and inspiration. Instead a sweatshop stands in its place, pumping young people through as quickly as possible in order to collect their tuition, hand them their diploma, and boast about their graduates futures. Claiming to offer the highest education college itself has been absorbed by the capitalist structure to a point that it is on the verge of collapse. This cookie cutter style of education is leaving more people unemployed and more people in debt than in success. This is due to our societies extreme devotion and nostalgia surrounding the capitalist structure. As capitalism has advanced, Universities have had to change their approaches in order to continue to make the same money. As result, the mundane repetition that you described has taken place of the once beacon for progress that university once exemplified.