Question

Essay on adverse effects of education?

Answer 1

What are the negative effects of education on the society?
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Jao Romero
Jao Romero, studied Education at Ateneo De Naga University (2004)
Answered May 9
Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. - Wikipedia.

By this definition, education can never have negative effects. It only produces negative effects when its process or acquisition is undertaken incorrectly. For example, many incorrectly equate schooling with education when in truth, schooling is only one way of being educated. All process of learning is part of education. This means that life itself is part of education.

If there are negative consequences, those are brought about by incorrect or misguided implementation of education, in other words, miseducation. This is not in the dictionary, but should be. Simply put, miseducation is being educated incorrectly either through a wrong process, a misguided ideology, or wrong information.

For example, students may be miseducated if they are taught:

using outdated teaching models
by biased ideologues
using wrong information
For example, for the vast majority of people, formal schooling is the only way to gain an education. But the practices in this sector has not been updated for nearly a century that many of the teaching methods and principles used are severely outdated. Many schools are still stuck in the information transfer model of teaching. Students are being taught WHAT to learn instead of being taught HOW to learn. This is a big problem as students go on to become mere parrots - carriers of knowledge, instead of scientists and innovators - the true harbingers of knowledge.

Formal schooling severely restricts creativity and innovation. This is because schools have been structured to create employees, not employers. Schools train students to be obedient, subservient, and docile. Questioning authority is not encouraged. Rules are made to make students perfect employees but poor scientists and innovators.

Formal schooling also employs a one-size-fits-all model. This is because customized education is impractical in mass education. You cannot expect a teacher of a class of 60 different students to teach each one according to their strengths and not their weaknesses. Schools would have to segregate students based on psychometric data if this were to be implemented. A complex and exhausting undertaking which no school bothers to go through with.

In today’s formal education, many students fall through the cracks because the industry is beset with so many problems that administrators and politicians fail to address. There’s an extreme shortage of teachers (and even of those teachers, an extreme shortage of qualified ones), an extreme shortage of classrooms, extreme shortage of teaching materials (books, libraries, computers, etc), and worst of all, a congested or inappropriate curriculum.

Many of these can be addressed by changing the way schools teach students. Foremost among the solution is changing the school’s curriculum. Next is moving from a one-size-fits-all model to a customized curriculum for each student. Third, and this is a sticking point among many teachers, is to increase teachers’ salary to be competitive enough so that the best of the best consider teaching as their first option instead of their last.