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The Public Education Controversy

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet – Aristotle. Education is the wise, hopeful and respectful development of learning undertaken in the belief that everyone should have the chance to share in life. When you think of education, you think of places like schools or colleges that teach and tutor students in order to prepare them for the future. We notice that education is a concept almost everyone would agree is a universal good, also one that is plagued by seemingly endless controversy because education is said to be a powerful opportunity that you can either build from, or destroy all at once, it’s your choice.

Education is built upon years of hard work, surpassing the all difficulties along the way. When in doubt you don’t build upon it, you completely destroy all the good opportunities that comes with it Many people consider education as a “common good” because in most cases it’s the weapon many people use in order to succeed in life. Speaking for those who seemingly work harder than others to take their education to places they would have never imagined of going. Those people like Martin Luther King, Jr. Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony, and Albert Einstein have all used their education to make a difference to the lives of not only themselves, but for others as well. From negotiating the end of apartheid in South Africa, from being a leader in the civil rights movement, from being one of the most important role in the women’s suffrage movement, from being the most influential physicist of the 20th century. Its people like this that make education “good” thing.

You can’t help but think education isn’t a good thing because that would just be lunatic thing for someone to do because of how prestigious the concept of education really is. None the less, people like King, Mandela, Anthony, and Einstein didn’t use their education for evil, but for good. Education is a secret weapon that they’ve used to change the world around them, once you’ve chosen to gain this power no one can ever take that away from you. Let’s look to what had happened to King, in all his years of education he sought for equality against his fellow African-Americans.

His knowledge, powerful charisma, and self-devotion helped him to eventually help progress the civil rights movement using nonviolent civil disobedience. Without his education he wouldn’t have accomplished his goal for equality, not only for African Americans, but equal rights for all. As we discussed before education for other people is a one key getaway to success, but for others it’s just a pass by, a boring four years of your life full of frustration, agony, and disappointment.

When you build from an education you can either decide what to learn from it, or completely loose it at all which is one of the leading causes to controversy towards this topic. We live in an era where there’s an abundance amount of opportunities available that people actually start to forget that they exist and they choose to not take advantage of it. It’s like when students in a high school are given free public education, where they decide what to learn and take from it in order to grow and expand plans for the future careers of the new generation.

But most scholars today are blind and don’t see the obvious purpose for this type of education, most students in their high school years waste their time not caring whether they’ve done their class work for the day or not, they’ve rather socialize in the hallways with others students just like them. I’ll give you a certain point in my life where I asked my parents about education and why is it important.

They gave me a simple response and told me “it’s the key to every unlocked door you could have ever imagined of and with that key holds the power of your education to be able to open that door. ” It’s back when my parents were younger that you had to actually pay for a proper education, not many people where they lived had enough money for an education, some children reach to an education of high school, to middle school, or not even an education at all. My mom actually had an education up until the 6th grade, while my father until 8th.

For others to take their education for granted is a disappointment to others you expect more when everything is handed. When you hand a given education to someone they don’t necessarily realize the hard work and mentality that was put towards others to get this far, because of some cases people may ask themselves so what’s so good about education if students take education as a joke. This is the part of education that makes people wonder is education really worth it? Over the course of a person’s educational life no two students are hardly alike.

There are students that are hard workers that try their very best each and every day until they’ve accomplished their goals and expectations in life, there are those lazy but smart students who are procrastinators that eventually get that 15 page essay done the night before it was due, then there are those students who are lazy and expect others to do their work for them, instead of cramming for than mid-term sociology exam they would rather party on with their next door sorority friends take a couple drinks or two and fail.

So how are students that do take their education seriously and don’t party every night differ to those who don’t try their best in school when everything the good students do doesn’t matter because they turn out to have the same outcomes? In William Deresiewicz’s “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League,” Dersiewicz makes a critique of the nation’s wealthiest and revered educational institutions that flailed the meritocracy they supposedly represent. He explains how an elite education can lead to a cycle of grandiosity and depression.

These students that Deresiewicz explains are “Super People,” the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today (Deresiewicz 1). This “race” since childhood that Deresiewicz perceives are very driven and talented students that are anxious, timid, and have a “stunted sense of purpose,” these students are trapped in a “bubble of privilege” heading in the same direction, having no since of why they’re doing it (Deresiewicz 1). Students that Deresiewicz explains are the students at elite schools who are caught in the act of compelling competition.

In Margaret Talbot’s “Best in Class,” Talbot examines the impact of naming a single valedictorian. The school system had to break ties between these two potential valedictorians, one was a boy named Davies, who secretly found out about the school’s tie breaker policies. He took an easy extra class to get more credits and won besides the other student named Kylie Barker who worked harder than others, never missed a day at school, and went to the library every day after school because she didn’t have a computer at home.

Many people didn’t think this was fair and wanted to band valedictorian competitions. “Everyone tries too hard to candy-coat things” (Talbot 112). When students like Kylie work hard to get something they want and don’t get it, it makes other people wonder why education is set up like this. Although many other students like Kylie might feel bad about themselves they shouldn’t little did they know with education comes not only intelligence, but character that you decide to take in as an individual.

Education is a concept almost everyone would agree is a universal good, also one that is plagued by seemingly endless controversy because of the fact that education is an opportunity you can either build upon or destroy all at once based the decisions that you take. Education isn’t just a piece of paper you get after several years at graduation for completing the task but it’s a characteristic that fulfills the mind of all the viabilities that you can use to follow you to wherever you want to go in life.

Those students that destroy all their opportunities available are what make education a controversial topic. But in reality those same people never succeed in life unless they wake up one day a billionaire, then all their hopes and dreams are crippled and destroyed for the purpose of them not taking action in building from their education . Education is what makes a person’s life worth living for, success speaks louder than words. That’s what makes it precious.

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