Life As An Alma Mater

3 Pages 771 Words

A college education should not be the primary source for intellectual growth. There is an entire world around us that can teach us just as much if not more than any structured curriculum. With the innate ability for understanding, the chance for learning is endless. Malcolm X, a Muslim minister of the Nation of Islam, had an eighth grade education, but he had the vocabulary and articulate speaking ability of a Yale Grad, with only a self taught education acquired while incarcerated. There’s too much emphasis on what university should one attends, instead of, what one gets out of that university upon graduation.
Freshman students are in the worst predicament. They’re enrolled in classes that are taught by smart grad students the university uses as cheap labor, while qualified professor are allowed to write books and research articles. A University’s focus isn’t on the professor’s ability to teach, but the ability to produce published works. According to Anne Matthew first and second year students never speak directly to a professor and are funneled into huge impersonal lecture courses that are sometimes depressing. Faculty get tenured on the basis of research and not their teaching skills, some deans will admit that bad teaching almost never prevents a good researcher from being almost kept, but a wondrous lecturer who doesn’t publish is usually doomed. While a student is stuck in an over crowed lecture hall attempting to memorize word for word what the student aid is teaching, they could have attained more information by simply sitting on a park bench and observing the world around them.
“My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness…” (Homemade Education Malcolm X p.762-763). College shouldn’t be a place where the main objective is graduating with a degree, a degree that in time will not be as adequate in future com...