“All of our institutions of higher education have an obligation and a duty to produce better citizens.”

Conversations concerning our educational system seem to be swirling around my ears as of late, particularly on a personal level. Some of my friends are graduating, others are applying, and a few are even teaching.

One of my closest buddies has been teaching at a public grammar school in Queens for 3 years through the Teach For America program. She’s a brilliant teacher (her 4th graders call her cell on the weekends), but the school as a whole is one of the worst in the nation. When we get together, we’re like Oprah and her crew discussing the problem and hypothesizing possible solution tracks. My friend is currently angling towards business. A business approach to improving our educational system… who would have thought? In my opinion, she’s eyeing a business degree for the right reasons—she's not focused on how much money the school will make her, but rather how much opportunity for change the school will provide her.

However, as the bar for “educational excellence" gets steadily ratcheted higher and higher, it seems that many are reaching for the wrong reasons. Kenja Hassan, a teacher at ASU (and my cousin ☺) captures these motivations particularly well in the clip below as she describes a speech she attended during her undergraduate career at Princeton University:

“I do remember one speaker saying to us, ‘If you’re not at Princeton learning how to make more money and become a capitalist, then you’re wasting your daddy’s money.’”

I’ve heard this speech before. We all have. From day 1, we’re taught to worship money.

Have students and universities grown to tacitly agree that a student’s starting salary upon graduating is the ultimate value of education? Ugh, that’s a scary prospect, but a real one. Hopefully more universities will take ASU’s direction and implement programs like Building Great Communities.

And hopefully more teachers will be calling their students just to say hi and instituting mid-day dance contests (yes, my Teach for America friend does this too…).

Comments

[CNKeach]

Sadly, it's all too common for many of today's college students to view their degree as the "hoop" they must jump to get a (rather) big and respectable paycheck. Too many of my students seem less concerned with actually absorbing material, interacting with it, making changes to it, being CREATIVE with it than with doing what they think they have to do to get a "good" grade. Sad. I keep waiting for the class/the year that it all changes.

In the meantime, I'm glad that you, Ryan and Kenja as well as your NYC friend, have gotten the point of a formal education, i.e. that learning never, ever stops, it gets more interesting, more compelling, more exciting.