Reading Response #4

Recently after reading an article called “In the Basement of the Ivory tower” by an author known as Professor X. Has left me contemplating our educational system today. Mainly post-secondary education and who is profiting the most from the need to have a population of schooled people. Professor X is a professor at a private college and a community college in the northeastern United States. He gives a somewhat bitter take on the kinds of things he is seeing from the professor side of the education ladder.
He thinks of himself as a Professor at the “college of last resort” and states that “for many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in.” He goes on to discuss how most of the students are there just to get a grade and move on to the next class. He is faced with the hard job of having to decide which students can move on in the chutes and ladders like game of continuing education.
With funding always being in dire need at community college or private ones more and more students are let in with the only qualifications as being. Do you have some way of paying the tuition. He so elloquetly puts it: “The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty.”
Which he as a professor has to try and sort through who shall pass and who shall fail. Not always being an easy job especially if some of your students might not have had the qualifications you would exspect them to have when being granted admittance. Which is made even harder being a professor of English versus another subject because as Professor X reminds us. “The biology teacher also enjoys the psychic ease of grading multiple-choice tests. Answers are right or wrong. The grades cannot be questioned.” Unlike English where there can be so many different right/wrong answers.

If Professor X is right and that most “college of last resort” students today are attending classes (with an emphasis on English classes) not because they want to broaden their education but because they have to. By some continuing education required by their job, or some certificate in schooling they need to get the job they want. As I believe they are too. Then maybe we need to reassess the popular assumption that post-secondary structured education is working like it was meant to.
Maybe we need to look into the way classes are set up for our education consumers. To get to the classes that you need to move forward in your career path. You must take a class or group of classes “pre requisites” that the college you are attending requires. Now at this time it doesn’t even matter one bit if these classes are relevant to the degree you are looking to obtain at all. They are a basic set of classes that someone high up in the long line of high up education task masters has deemed useful to furthering the schooling offered at that particular college.
So maybe we as a society need to make a change in the way those classes are set up. Take a look at what we are spending our money on. Are we getting swindled in our schooling? I would say yes. Textbooks are the biggest scam out there right up there with the pharmaceutical companies in my opinion. But even if I don’t believe In all the extra classes I am made to take or the five million versions of the same textbook. I can say that my English class I am in right now has inspired so much thought that it was worth it. Because isn’t that what education is all about? Higher thinking. Unless of course I end up with the dreaded F and end up having to pay to take it all over again.