Compare four different authors about education - Essay Example

The disparity underscored here is the quality of education and the assistance the teachers and/or the managers of the schools offer students to make them ready to face life. The major failure of the management in the public schools is that teachers’ jobs are protected by the government such that no any teacher may be fired for underperformance, like it happens in the charter schools. The result is breeding of bad teachers in the public schools that makes students flee from these schools to charter schools.

Worse still, the parents fight for their students to become enrolled in charter schools than in public schools. Ravitch proposes moderated sacking of bad teachers (the underperforming teachers) in the public schools and replacing them with good teachers in this context. Sharing the same view as Ravitch’s, Stanley Fish in “The Value of Higher Education Made Literal” critiques the modern education systems observed in various government. Fish taps into the failures of the British government by commoditizing education such that the higher one bargains for the better the remuneration thereafter.

Fish’s argument is that the government and the learned education moderators have collectively rewarded education with money such that currently there are different prices for different courses. Fish argues that the more costly the course one undertakes, the higher the reward – monetary pay. He says that it is not possible, today, as it were in the past, to take chances by following one’s dream profession – the nature does not provide such choices any more as it is now the ‘survival for the fittest’ mentality in action.

The tougher and the more marketable course one undertakes the brighter the future, of course in terms of salary to be earned. The motivation of the students in the institutions of higher learning has thus shifted from ‘learning to become accomplished’ to ‘learning to earn higher salaries in the future’. This will easily lead to washing away of courses that are not marketable while the marketable ones gains in this sense. Therefore, arts are more likely to lose value while sciences become high priced – the courses value is now money value attached to them.

At the same time, as the students’ parents adapt to the new system and buy various courses according to their financial strength, the students do not have choice but take what is offered in the bargain. Instead of following their genuine aspirations, they adapt to the costly courses that will guarantee better returns in the future. Therefore, education is literally being sold (Midwinter 42) and the highest bidder takes it all. While the Fish believes that students are currently learning what is dictated by nature inevitably against their own will, Rebekah Nathan, in “My Year as a Freshman” underscores that the discipline in classroom has changed a big deal.

Perhaps the power to purchase a particular course or discipline changes everything. But Nathan, a professor at a university gets disturbed so much by the thought that students today lack in discipline and are difficult to teach. Nathan decides to go back to enroll as a student in a university, while hiding her real identity, to experience what students of today face. She previously coined that the students in today’s academic institutions are difficult to teach – they are volatile and rebellious –