- College students should be encouraged to pursue subjects that interest them rather than the courses that seem most likely to lead to jobs.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.
Stating that college students should be encouraged to pursue subjects that interest them rather than the courses that seem most likely to lead to jobs, the speaker asserts that truly effective education is one that respects fully the students’ internal preference and demands, rather than one forces them to calculate about the likelihood of secular success. In general, I also agree that learning should pay more attention to students’ dreams, interests, and internal passions. However, I still believe that dreams that cannot be guided by the actual changes in social trends might be lowered to quixotic illusions; practical considerations are as much as or even more important than students’ pure interests.
Of course, few would disagree that too much mundane approach taken by either students or educators may seriously threaten true learning. Meanwhile, following one’s natural interest can boost a student’s motivation. Especially, when it comes to forming of a sense of responsibility, it is not forced assignments but students’ hearts that ensure responsible pursuits of knowledge. With the help of his or her own choice and preference, a student guided by his heart can tolerate any type of inevitable adversities more than another student who lacks such internal inspiration.
With regard to deeper thinking and development of specialty, it seems more advantageous for a student to pursue what she really wants to know than to seek what she needs to learn. While a forced learning can be easily tempted to make compromise at the point where a usual examination emphasizes as a common ground, an internally motivated search may go more profound and sophisticated areas of a subject, areas we usually call expertise.
Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that college students should ignore the external demands of their time and society. To prevent students’ valuable dreams from being loosened or astray, a wise teacher should remind them of the true meaning of their dreams in the context of social trends as a whole. Without an adequate consideration of the real world, students’ interests might be wasted as blind quests for impractical vanity. In fact, most successful figures have been those whose young years were geared by some heretical visions—unique interests; but, more importantly, among those visions, only the visions which were properly controlled by a well-developed sense of pragmatic rationality could survive enough to accompany their possessors’ successes.
People would say that, when choosing their field of study, students should consider their own interests and talents over other worldly criteria such as the availability of jobs or the likelihood of success in that field. In some sense, it is hard to deny that practical concerns have only limited importance for a college student to determine his or her course of life. From my viewpoint, however, excessive emphasis on personal interests is somewhat outdated; I think respect for the external social demands is one of the important responsibilities an educational institute should take.
Of course, few would disagree that students should first take into account their own interests and dispositions. For more well-motivated pursuits in their academic life, it is not unnatural that students should be guided by their hearts. Instead of being forced to learn something outside of his primary interest, a student who is given a chance to pursue what he really wants to learn can schedule his course for growth and take responsibility for the result with a higher level of motivation.
Moreover, the importance of internal demands in students’ growth seems clear when it comes to the depth and consistency of learning. In fact, a student considering only the chance of mundane success may treat and approach the subjects of a course only by several superficial standards such as final grade points. Rather than exploring the fundamental, covert orders, he might be obsessed with several colorful, attractively named techniques and concepts he can show off later in the actual job market. …………..
The speaker asserts that successful education can be made by encouraging students to pursue subjects that interest them rather than seek pragmatic programs. For some reasons, it seems probable that pragmatic approaches should be yielded to the somewhat idealistic but still important purposes of education as a primary matter in college education. Only by respecting students’ personal interest, however, colleges and schools may lose impending demands that any society can expect from its college graduates.
To begin with, to respect individual personality and personal interests is indispensible for successful education in any level of study. Especially, for some students whose personal purposes are aimed at certain specific field of knowledge, demanding them to pursue courses that are not directly related to their personal interests can result in failure to motivate those students, or even make them lose their initial interests in learning. Thus, it is not difficult to find out many students in so-called popular disciplines of learning who are not inspired and motivated to learn something because they are studying subjects chosen not by their voluntary will but by the social pressure to pursue them or myopic judgment made by the mundane and pragmatic standards. Without nurturing an individual’s initial interest, education could be a waste of time.
Nevertheless, providing students with timeless value systems and respecting their personal interest in every level of education is not always a virtue. In our modern societies where many other social institutions such as religion or internet can provide various types of advices to help students’ personal interests, it would be redundant and unresponsive for school systems to emphasize the subjects that touch only the students’ personal interests. Because students’ personal interests can be met from these institutions, education system can be more meaningful when it helps students prepare for the world of work. Moreover, one teacher cannot advise to the diverse interests of different students. In this case, it would be wiser to leave the role of nurturing personal interests to church, family, peer-group, and Internet.
In addition, from the economic point of view, weakening of practical knowledge in college would mean the decrease of the prospective workers’ social adaptability. Despite the existence of several jobs which can take an individual’s unique interest and orientation into use, most jobs in our modern industries do not benefit from an employee’s philosophical uniqueness but from his or her technical knowledge and skills. Without preparing them to equip with various technical skills, college can be accused of abandoning this fundamental responsibility.
Finally, lack of practical training in college would also mean the increase of social cost needed to re-train the beginning workers in every workplace. For most companies which want to reduce the training cost, it would be natural to select those students who are relatively well equipped with the proper skills honed during their school years. If students have problems to enter into the world of work because of this reason, education system which focuses only on the idealistic goals of enriching one’s personality and nurturing students’ idiosyncratic curiosity can be accused of both not being responsible and increasing social cost to train a workable employee. This also says that college should not ignore the practical education at the expense of excessively quixotic purposes.
In sum, despite the importance of caring for personal interests and uniqueness, education can not overlook the practical goals. Especially, the existence of various institutions to nurture students’ person interests and the side effects of weakening in practical learning tell us that the speaker’s assertion is not always desirable. Isn’t it too simple, idealistic and outdated to think that college is just for developing an individual’s personal interest?