- Educational institutions should actively encourage their students to choose fields of study that will prepare them for lucrative careers.
Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider the possible consequences of implementing the policy and explain how these consequences shape your position.________________________________________
"The purpose of education should be to create an academic environment that is separate from the outside world. This kind of environment is ideal because it allows students to focus on important ideas without being held back by practical concerns.
The speaker asserts that the most effective education can be possible when schools create an academic environment separate from the outside world and free from practical concerns. In some sense, it is true that making students focus on pure academic concerns without practical ones can facilitate effective learning. Only by emphasizing the benefits from academic purity, however, the speaker is overlooking the possible limitations inherent in the approach, especially in terms of
Needless to say, it is undeniable that allowing students to focus on important ideas without being held back by practical concerns is important to their learning process for many grounds. In most modern educational institutes which have experienced the decline in the number of students interested in basic and fundamental scientific areas, the academic environment free from practical concerns may relieve the stasis or regression of those areas. Given the environment under which many students are primarily stimulated by the pragmatic calculations to choose such advantageous majors in future job market as applied statistics rather than mathematics, computer-based mechanics rather than traditional physics and kinetics, the academic environment limiting pragmatic availability would contribute to revitalizing the relatively traditional, seemingly impractical, but essential subjects. This says that academic purity is sometimes beneficial and necessary for the integrity of education.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that separation of academic society from the real world is always a virtue to students’ learning. For most students whose primary concerns is not or cannot be the learning for learning’s sake, classes focusing only on the impractical topics would prevent students from preparing their future lives effectively. Many businesses would prefer students who are sensitive to the trend of real world to those who lack the readily available practical skills and knowledge. Thus, failure of schools to offer the chance to experience the outside world demands would be equal to the failure of education. —————————————
The speaker asserts that academia should be a holy place free from mundane concerns of the outside world. In some sense, it is true that education should be a process to enrich the various aspects of a person rather than that simply to provide practical knowledge and train students as productive workers. However, I think pure learning in schools is an outdated concept in our modern society in the following senses.
Of course, it is undeniable that learning for learning’s sake is still an effective policy in our modern education. With respect to expansion of independent creativity, it is very important for schools to encourage students to experience and attack diverse personal interests without being held back by the demands of the actual world. However impractical, vulnerable, and counterproductive daydreams they might be, liberal thoughts and venturous ideas earned during school years can help students develop innovative life-long world views critical to their future careers. When Steve Jobs says “open your dreams rather than books”, it is clear that we sometimes learn more from the impractical processes than from education aimed simply at increase of practical knowledge.
To me, however, the notion that education should be working under the total sanitization seems to be an outdated concept. With respect to creation of new hybrid subfields in any inquiry, the actual demands from the outside world have contributed to development of many modern interdisciplinary programs. Mathematics, for example, instead of staying within its narrow traditional boundary, has explored new areas and built several mongrel subfields such as Econometrics and Biostatistics that reflect the real demands from businesses and hospitals. Without the free communication between academia and the outside world, most disciplines in academia might have had no meaningful expansions in terms of both their width and depth.