Essay on "Purpose of Education"

Essay 6 pages (1970 words) Sources: 4

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Education:

One the major debates in the recent past has been the significance of college or university education. The raging debate has overshadowed the concerns of many parents regarding the college challenge i.e. attempts to determine the specific college their children can get into based on the available resources after graduating from high school. The debate about the purpose of college education has raised serious questions including whether college exists to ensure a good employment opportunity after graduation or to provide students with wide and deep education on humanities. The over-riding factor in the debate is whether college education teaches students on how to think and write critically or both. Some individuals have argued that college is a platform for vocational training while others state that it's an opportunity for exploration. As a college student, understanding the importance of college education is crucial not only to my academic success but also vital for achievement of personal objectives. Following critical analysis and considerations, college serves the purpose of exploration. College provides a freedom that forces you to develop a structure and helped me to discover my passion in a manner I would not be able to through merely going to internships.

The college challenge is undoubtedly the most difficult tasks for many parents whose kids are graduating from high school. During this period, parents tend to be overwhelmed by the dilemma of the particular college their children should get into and what they can afford (Tugend par, 1). For most of these parents, the availability of resources in terms of what they can afford seems to be most important factors in determining the college their children get into. Therefore, the availability of or lack of resources determines the kind of college education the child will receive and the college he/she will get into.

The most discouraging aspect of the parental college challenge is that most of them tend to make the college decision without consideration of the individual characteristics of their children. Many parents do not try to figure out the kind of college their children should attend based on the passions and personal objectives of these children. Their decisions are purely based on the availability and accessibility of the material resources required for the child to go through college. As a result, many children are left out in the decision making process of the college to get into because of the lack of consideration of their passions.

The tendency to ignore the individual passions and desires of the child has contributed to the focus on what major the child is in rather than the contribution of college education to his/her ambitions in life. Unfortunately, most of these kids get into college and graduate from it without knowing the actual objective on why they went to college in the first place. People are no longer raised on the belief that college education is vital in the accomplishment of individual passions, but they are instead taught on the how lucrative and attractive a particular field is. Decisions regarding college education have now been merely reduced to the attractiveness and profitability of a specific field.

This has contributed to the emergence of huge concern regarding the purpose of college education, which can be considered as the societal college challenge. The societal college challenge has been characterized by raging debate on whether college education is for vocation or exploration. Is college education merely for the purpose of ensuring a good job after graduation or is it a place to provide broad and deep humanities education? Does college education train students or individuals on how to think or write critically or both? Does college promote the development of individual structure and discovery of individual passion? Is college education centered on completion of the syllabus or personal development of students? These are examples of questions that are asked in order to determine the purpose of college education.

Generally, college is essentially a four-year intelligence test in which students are required to show their intellectual ability over time and across a variety of subjects (Menand par, 7). Moreover, college education can be considered as a multifaceted and fine-grained process for achieving this objective. The determination of the societal college challenge is complicated by the belief that the society needs a means for sorting out its more intelligent members from the less intelligent ones. The main reason for this mechanism is that the society wants to indentify the intelligent people early on in order to channel them into fields that maximize their talents.

The evident uncertainty in determining the societal college challenge, especially on whether is for vocation or exploration is due to the seeming ineffective criteria for decisions about college education. As long as the individual passions and desires are not the basis of the decisions about college education, it is increasingly difficult to determine the purpose of college.

Due to the inability to determine the actual purpose of college education because of the apparent lack of consideration of individual passions and desires in the decision about college education, college has been used to serve various purposes. In most cases, college has been used as a place for meeting the pundit's demands for a highly skilled workforce, which implies the need for more college graduates. The pitfall of this purpose is that the workforce is divided based on the lucrative to less profitable jobs or distribution of earnings by majors, which hinders the actual purpose of college. Therefore, individuals get into college to meet this need for skilled workforce as they make the decision based on the job divisions of the workforce.

In order to meet the need for highly skilled workforce, employers are becoming increasingly attracted to college graduates since they view college degree as a sign of ability to obey and conform. This implies that employers see the purpose of college as a place to teach people how to obey and conform. While this may be true to a certain extent, it doesn't really capture the whole essence of college education. College has more to offer to an individual rather than simply teaching him/her how to obey and conform, especially in the workforce.

The Actual Purpose of College:

While the significance of college education continues to be a hot topic of discussion, college can still be the most enlightening experience of an individual's life (Ehrenreich par, 8). From my individual point-of-view, college serves the purpose of exploration rather than vocation, especially when individual passions and desires are used as the criteria for determining decisions about college education. I believe that college is not only a tool, not a four-year intelligence test, not a sorter, or something that helps an individual to prepare for boredom. The purpose of college education is exploration since it is what opens a person's eyes to new and exciting possibilities in life.

Exploration basically promotes the achievement of individual self-fulfillment as well as the growing needs across the society. In essence, colleges not only focus on the syllabus of particular fields but they also emphasize the need for personal development. The major reason that can be attributed to the purpose of college being exploration instead of vocation is that the existence of colleges is to help develop a fairer and increasingly just society.

College education achieves its purpose of exploration by not only training students for their first job in the workplace after graduation but it also ensure students are trained for decades of self-fulfillment. In this case, college tackles the needs of both the outsiders and the insiders within the education system. Therefore, college addresses the needs of both the people in the external environment and that of individuals in the educational system.

This not only promotes its ability of college to play its actual role but also provides a mechanism for addressing the uncertainty about its purpose. For students, the exploration purpose of college is a win-win situation since they not only want to be prepared for their first jobs after graduation but they also want decades of self-fulfillment (Swartz par, 2).

My college education and experience has served the purpose of exploration, which has been supported by my major. Generally, college has provided me with freedom that has enabled me to create a personal structure that promoted the discovery of my passion. In my own experience, college has served the provided exploration through various aspects including & #8230;

Provision of Variety:

Exploration in college is achieved because of the variety created by the educational system or institutions. While an individual chooses to major in a particular field, college education enables him/her to survey various opportunities that are related to the field. Actually, flexibility or variety has become a common characteristic of college education since an individual is permitted to major in a certain field while having a minor in other inter-related areas of expertise. Through the provision of variety in college, I have been able to explore various fields such as architecture and communication though my… READ MORE

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