The End of Public Education
Visualize a flourishing society where children grow up happy with their family and friends, living life, going day by day doing what they enjoy--may it be playing football outside with their friends, taking walks through woods and by creeks, or maybe surfing the internet for games, even stumbling upon music or a video showing the vastness of the universe on YouTube! These are all encounters with the future, potential sparks, hidden, that have the possibility of becoming the fascination of a child.
Playing football may lead to a hidden talent of fantastic speed. Taking walks through woods and by creeks may provoke an obsession with the little frog that happened to hop into the stream as a young boy passes by, frightening him. Games on the internet may prompt a curiosity as to how it was made, how it works, how the page it resides on works, how the internet works! The immeasurable exposure to massive amounts of lifestyles, topics, arts on YouTube is of incalculable value. Humans are curious creatures; always on the prowl for information--absorbing it, analyzing it. When something takes interest, it grows like wildfire! But when an authority takes over and requirements are made curiosity retreats and the fire is doused.
Public education is this authority. It whelms entire lives until it becomes life, and a premature, erroneous idea of the meaning of life is drawn up out of the unintended, yet, nonetheless, negligible signals delivered by the system to the mass of students that will be the future. Signals that draw ideas such as "everyone is the same", "knowledge is more valuable than happiness", "stress is a part a life". These gestures are just one downside to an otherwise well constructed machine...
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...f that natural human curiosity that all are born with.
Public education is simply unnecessary. It is unfair, wrong, and inefficient. This does not mean knowledge and education is unnecessary, as they are both immensely valuable, but they can both be acquired through living. A base level knowledge is always necessary, but is something that is taught as one is raised as child. A toddler being potty trained goes alongside learning simple math and reading skills--it's all learned through childhood. There are also private institutions available to provide a competitive offering of a "traditional" education, and homeschooling available to those who prefer a more personalized route.
Picture a world where people don’t need to be told what they have to learn. Curiosity and ambition lead to knowledge. Knowledge is an amenity of happiness, not the other way around.
Schools, nor any other institution that will be providing education cannot refuse to give your/any child the service needed because it costs too much. The Federal Law, IDEA requires school to provide the services a child needs to gain a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) means at no cost to the parents. According to Altshuler and Kopels (2003), Advocating in Schools for Children with Disabilities: What’s New with IDEA?” States that it is mandated a variety of legal rights to have a free and appropriate public education provided in the least restrictive area/environment. For this reason parents are their children’s best advocates. Parents know their children better than anyone else. No matter the circumstances a parent sees all the flaw and potential at home that a teacher or administrator will never see.
Knowledge can be the key to success and can lead people to happier life. However, there are some instances that you can not gain any more knowledge because of how it would change your whole life. The drive of wanting more and more knowledge is best portrayed through two well -known books. In Mary Shelley’s, Frankenstein, and in Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, both the creature and Charlie are ostracized by society because they are different from everyone else but this distinction gave way for distinct fallouts because of their quest for knowledge beyond their reach to achieve happiness.
We as humans tend to have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We look for knowledge about everybody and everything that surrounds us in our day-to-day life. Sadly though, we must accept that in the grand scheme of life we (as a society) tend to put pleasure above our quest for knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge tends to take time and energy, two things we call invaluable, and it also shows us things that might depress us. Contrastingly, ignorance takes no time and energy.
In 'A Streetcar Named Desire' we focus on three main characters. One of these characters is a lady called Blanche. As the play progresses, we gradually get to know more about Blanche and the type of person she really is in contrast to the type of person that she would like everybody else to think she is. Using four main mediums, symbolism and imagery, Blanche's action when by herself, Blanche's past and her dialogue with others such as Mitch, Stanley and the paperboy, we can draw a number of conclusions about Blanche until the end of Scene Five. Using the fore mentioned mediums we can deter that Blanche is deceptive, egotistical and seductive.
Aside from school or Universities, our world is a huge classroom. All of us learned things that are not taught in school, but there are some methods that we follow in order to simplify and to understand more regarding the task of different fields of knowledge. In our society today, most people learn by mimicking others and their actions that are influenced by past experiences. There is knowledge that is handed down from mouth to mouth generation that never committed in writing. When I think about knowledge, the first thing that comes up with my mind is education. Education requires self-determination, dedication, and experience. According to John Henry Newman’s philosophy of
The most powerful aspect of this essay is not the essay itself (as you will see) but, rather, the fact that it was written by an American college student.
Marquis de Condorcet’s Future Progress of the Human Mind depicts knowledge as being something that human beings want to achieve. To attain more knowledge on a specific thing, the information must be available through more universal education along with subjects being easier to classify. When the knowledge is available and simpler for humans, they will want to learn. Through people wanting to learn more things, new information will want to be discovered and in conclusion, be a happier place. Knowledge, in Condorcet’s eyes, is the key to happiness because it allows people to focus on life rather than surviving.
Knowledge helps people make conclusions, lets them be skillful, smart, and keeps them aware. People gather knowledge through experience, whether it's from school, mistakes, witnessing a situation, or trying new activities out. Including in “Fahrenheit 451”, the author, Ray Bradbury does an amazing job in explaining and describing to his audience of how society results in a setting without reasonable amounts of knowledge. People in the society of “Fahrenheit 451” begin to lose common sense after the books are prohibited to keep. In the novel 451 Ray Bradbury warns the audience that without knowledge people are manipulated easily. In reality knowledge is the key to surviving.
Someone has always been there to tell you what to do in life. As a young child, you were told to behave properly and not to eat too many sweets. As you grew older and older, it seemed as if the responsibilities became greater and greater in number. Even as an adult, there was always an officious boss telling you what to do. There was always some higher force that bound your actions. Authority was the major theme in the novel 1984, by George Orwell. Authority was also a profound factor in Stanley Milgram’s experiment conducted in 1974. It seems that authority has been around longer than any of us can remember, and it is authority that dictates the way we act.
Our knowledge is a key to our success and happiness in our life to give us personal satisfaction. Knowledge is power but not always. Sometimes our self-awareness and growth as an individual gives us negative thoughts that make us want to go back to undo it. Everyone wants to unlearn a part in our life that brought us pain and problems. Good or bad experiences brought by true wisdom can be used for our self-acceptance, self-fulfillment and these experiences would make us stronger as we walk to the road of our so called “life”, but Douglas’s and my experience about knowledge confirmed his belief that “Knowledge is a curse”. Both of us felt frustrated and sad from learning knowledge.
Public schools are still the most popular way to educate a child. Depending on where a person lives and is zone for education a child could end up in a public school that is outstanding or a school that is failing in their academics. Being in a public school offers so much more than just academics. Going to a public school a
In Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, main character Blanche Dubois to begin with seems to be a nearly perfect model of a classy woman whose social interaction, life and behavior are based upon her sophistication. The play revolves around her, therefore the main theme of drama concerns her directly. In Blanche is seen the misfortune of a person caught between two worlds-the world of the past and the world of the present-unwilling to let go of the past and unable, because of her character, to come to any sort of terms with the present.
Throughout my experience in the public school system, I have heard the line, “What do I need to know this for anyway?” about 1,057 times. It is not uncommon to hear students complain about the worth of their education. Regardless, there seems to be a unanimous agreement that the youth needs education to succeed in life. What is education anyway and what does schooling accomplish? In his book, “A Time to Learn” George Wood provides a definition of education as “making wise citizens and good neighbors who can think deeply and intelligently about issues of self and society, take care for and respect others, take care of their family needs, and contribute to the welfare of others” (Glickman 48). Is school necessary for developing this type of educated citizen? If not, how is it we measure success and how is school important in attaining that?
Unfortunately, not everyone is able to appreciate all that public schools have to offer because they get their vision blurred by all the benefits of private schools. The only thing holding them back may be cost. If these people would just take some time to find out that there are just as many wonderful things about the schools our governments provide, they may feel more confident in their choice. Those never exposed to anything but private education miss out on the diversity among students, extra vocational and extracurricular classes, and may even continue to not understand all that public schools have to offer.
Education should be equal because everyone deserves to be educated no matter of financial background. Schooling provides a lot of benefits for students and the separation elevates one student over another. Education is often viewed as the key to success and since everyone is not given the same tools to succeed something needs to be improved. Public school should be abolished because they do not allow equal opportunities for students and the education provided is not equal.