February 12, 2025

Lecture on the Problems of Education in 2020

A very significant issue when it comes to children learning today is the overwhelming influence of the internet. Students today have grown up their whole lives with google right at their fingertips. If they can’t remember the date of a historical event, just google it, if they don’t remember how to spell infectious, just google it, if they don’t know the square root of 121, just google it. Google and the rest of the internet has done a great deal to improve today’s society, but it severely impacts today’s generation, myself included.

There are several side effects that can come from this dependence later in life. Signs have already been showing that the new people in the workplace, millennials and generation Z, have shown signs of laziness and reliance on technology or other people. The fear I have is that the COVID-19 pandemic is just going to make this worse. As schools and classes have shifted to online education, it is even easier for a lazy student to not focus in class, or to cheat on tests and homework. The initiative is even more on the shoulders of the individual than it previously was, as the student themselves is the only person stopping them from copying homework or turning off their zoom camera. Obviously, it makes sense for some colleges and school systems to remain fully remote to avoid more spread of the pandemic, but the structure with zoom classes has many flaws. I am not here to declare a perfect fix for the online class system, but I do believe more can be done to hold students accountable once in person learning is allowed back. 

One of the major problems I had in school growing up was enjoying time in class, and this translated over to doing homework after school. School days always seemed to drag on and on, and once I got back home from school, I did not want to do hours of homework after spending the whole school day learning. The normal school schedule is either too rigorous, or there is too much homework given. Children who are in the education system should not see school as a burden or something that is terrible, but that is just the way it is. One thing the COVID-19 outbreak has taught us is that when students aren’t in school five days a week, they start to miss school and yearn to go back. Although this might not be for purely educational purposes, the importance of time away from school is visible. This flaw of the overworking of students is one of the reasons why students develop this hatred for learning.

I believe that if students didn’t hate coming to school or hated the overload of homework, students would be more passionate about specific fields and subjects. The Two Cultures debate by C.P. Snow conglomerates the stereotypes and qualities of the people from the two cultures, humanities and physical sciences. Snow’s argument is that it is not healthy for students to be put into these boxes, and it is important to study outside of your field of choice. If the workload problem of school today was solved, students may take more interest in other subjects. Too often students take classes that are easy because they are similar to what they have done before. Even I decided to enroll in a calculus class similar to one I had taken in high school, and I definitely regret that decision already. Although the assignments come easy to me and are not very time consuming, I feel like I am wasting my time, when I could be in a more advanced calculus class. 

Overall, liberal arts colleges like Colby allow their students some time to make a decision on a major, and this is a practice that has great importance. The importance in giving students freedom to make decisions is significant.

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