College or technical schools are supposed to be the gateway to higher paying careers, but most are not all that they are cracked up to be. The standards and goals that society wants met are continually not being met by the students today. Also, many higher learning facilities lack the funds to provide positive learning environments for students. For these reasons and many more are keeping the students of today from benefiting fully from schools. Society today has to make some new choices for the students of tomorrow, choices that will carry them into the next millennium.
Society can either “lower standards so that everybody “passes” in a way that looses all meaning in the real world” or “ raise standards and then meet them” (Barber 479). I personally believe in raising our expectations and doing whatever is needed to meet them. Our countries standards are among the lowest in the world and “ at the same moment as we are transferring our responsibilities to the shoulders of the next generation, we are blaming them for our own generation’s most conspicuous failures” (Barber 472).
Every election year the candidates use something about education as one of their platforms, but few ever carry through with them once they are elected. Most education bills die in congress in some shape or another and the ones that actually make it through congress, are usually ineffective because they have been changed and modified to the point of ineffectiveness. Also, many of the learning facilities today lack the funding to provide adequate, positive learning environments for students.
Underpaid teachers and professors who “ make less than accountants architects, doctors, lawyers, engineers, judges, health professionals, auidiors, and surveyors” and thus many student disregard teachers as role models. If people see someone who can score touchdowns or dunk a basketball making millions while their teachers are scraping bottom to survive, then how can an educator possibly motivate them to learn (Barber 470). Many people chase after their “dreams” of money instead of seeing the reality of learning.
Although society today rates an education as one of their top priorities, they still allow learning facilities to become broken and run down. Like animals, children and adults file into buildings with bad floors, horrible plumbing, leaky roofs and ceilings, and pack into desk, usually 35+ per educator. Today the government spends $35,000 a year to keep someone behind bars and only a fraction of that to keep them in school (Barber 475).
Tuition, room, and board at most colleges now come to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. This might seem to suggest that the colleges are getting rich. But they are equally battered by inflation. Tuition covers only 60 percent of what it cost to educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in endowments, grants, and gifts” (Bird 498). Its about time we started to provide more money.
Funding more for education wont solve every problem but no problem can even begin to be solved without it. The so-called higher learning facilities of today are selling students short when it comes to their education. Properly funding the education system and setting new standards for the future is an important part of education reform. Education reform for the US is a vital part of insuring the future for students and bringing them up to the standards set by other countries.
