School Does Not Prepare You for Life

It is argued that school is designed to teach individuals how to teach themselves, but many scholars who study the state of academia would argue this is not the case. It is a common belief that the western private schools and universities are industrialized markets more focused on their profit margins, and pleasing parents, than preparing their students for the real world. The public school system is even worse off in that their infrastructure and supplies are largely dependent on the average income tax of their local communities, which in most urban areas barely makes the grade. Not often considered to be a home for organizations, the schooling industry in the United Kingdom has become a major source of profitable income. A national curriculum is mandatory in all state schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and for virtually every student up to the age of 16. It is organized by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and its partner authorities, the Qualifications, Curriculum and Assessment Authority for Wales and the Northern Ireland Council for Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA) (HayGroup, 2006). The main aim of the national curriculum is to raise standards, making sure all children have a broad and balanced education up to the age of 16. In the past, many students dropped important subjects like modern language or science at 13 or 14 (Boone, 2006). If these mergers become successful, no different from major corporations, they mean expanded profit margins for whoever holds the asset. These schools are already considered financial assets, through the increase in property value around them, whether the property is owned by the government or privately owned (Boone, 2006). This is not a major issue for public schools, but when you consider privately owned schools, or Universities, the profitability of these corporations pedaling degrees must be realized. More often than not, these Universities are considered to be doing a common good, and therefore held in the charitable status tax bracket, where they are to very minimally taxed. This leads to more profit gains, and less reason to complicate the curriculum even if it fails to serve its purpose. In her essay, From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work Jean Anyon identifies the hypocrisies in the education system. One of her major points is that in the higher income classrooms the majority of the students’ parents are executives, and only 10% are minorities. A common finding in her research is that the working class schools lack the necessary materials, or faculty, to be considered equal with the other school systems. Anyon also argues that the curriculums are different. students in different social-class backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different occupational strata – the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and personal assertiveness. (Anyon, 1980) The defining line of the difference between what Anyon considers to be the executive curriculum and the working class is that the use of efficient learning methods verses inefficient forms. Historically, the most efficient form of learning used in the west, more so than textbooks, is the field trip; this is also known as project based learning (B. I. E. , 2002). It is also a very expensive learning tool, which is why most lower class curriculums are deprived of it. Project based learning has a long lived tradition of learning through the use of field trips, labs, investigations and other projects. It is considered to be a substantial method of teaching. The belief that drives this form of instructions revolves around the idea that students will be more liable to gain interest in curriculum that they can connect to their surroundings. Just studying the work in a text can grow to be mundane. When she analyzes elementary and secondary classroom curriculums, she finds a methodology very different from what is inherent in Project based education. Anyon discovers that the majority of contemporary textbook instruction is designed for the working class. PBL programs are usually not supported in public schools because they are too expensive. This difference is usually applicable to public schools and whether one is located near high income housing or low income housing. In sum, the school system in the U. K. suffers from capitalist interests, so much so that it fails to prepare its students for the real world. A lack of project based learning in lower income schools deprives the majority of the U. K. population of having real life instruction. Likewise, the upper class institutions that Anyon refers to, while they prepare students for executive positions, they handicap the students from ever being able to handle manual labor in the real world (Anyon, 1980). The end result is a generation of students that are socioeconomically segregated and that lack the necessary resourcefulness to survive on their own. School systems today produce students who are reliant on major corporations to employ them for skills they were predisposed to having.