Graduate School: To Be or Not To Be

I write to you to express hot displeasure toward one of the world’s finest institutions: the institution of education.

It is the institution of education that has made the difference between whether societies become modern and vital or remain stagnant and decrepit. Yet parody lies in today's environmental learning model that only ensures the mechanistic education of our children.

Just as cogs in the wheel are uniform to serve a purpose, the assembly lines of higher education today produce carbon copy compliant citizens of narrow opinion. Education depersonalizes society and yields graduates who then plateau at the Starbucks drive-thru where everyone is happy and having a good day, or else.

As the new school year approaches, that plastered corporate smile finds its way onto many of the students' faces despite their growing discontentment with “the system.”

Everything from piles of paperwork secretly stamped as red tape to the infamous echelon entrance exam, all the way down to the grueling placement test regimen: students wonder if they will survive the system or if the system will survive them.

The bottom line is always a student's performance rating according to someone else’s margin of benefit.

Every fiber of our society is so tightly interwoven with the fabric of the bottom line that pulling one thread would unravel our prefab costumes of care and concern. To challenge education as an ill-fitting, one-size-fits-all is to find yourself outside the institutional walls of promotion and delegation.

The spotlight on the stage of intellect is slow to shine on those homemade successes who refuse to believe that education is a fad or refuse to be institutionally delimited.

Too often, schools dictate rote responses rather than facilitate true learning. Universities require instead of inquire.

Teachers and professors divide and hide instead of guide.

And to make the grade, students flatter and chatter instead of daring to explore what really matters.

But students meekly comply with what is strictly dictated by their syllabus rather than expand their own frontier.

The only sustainable model of education is the unquenchable desire for knowledge.

An overemphasis on scoring, calculated measures of intelligence and bureaucratic protocols are at best stifling forces against those who would otherwise possess a natural desire to learn.

I am outside the clique of education, so I am more aware of education's shortcomings. But I am tired of looking from the outside, in. When I dared to improve my position by becoming a graduate student--to come closer to the front of where I wanted to be--I felt as if everyone was peering at me, secretly whispering that I was born on the wrong side of the educational tracks.

I have just recently been informed that “Although we appreciate your interest in our program, the committee does not feel that it can recommend admittance . . . . In cases such as yours, the committee looks for other indicators of potential success at the graduate level, namely high GRE scores, evidence of past success in quantitative methods or mathematics courses…”

Keep in mind that this was not a rejection from the math department.

Setting everything else aside, standardized testing is the embodiment of my dissatisfaction.

Could it be that standardized testing is only necessary to measure intelligence because individuals trapped in the system have lost the confidence to come to their own conclusions?

Could it be that standardized testing is a way in which the system’s discrimination can be disguised as haughty indignation to preserve an educational “standard of excellence?”

According to the current educational model, my above average but not outstanding test scores—my bottom line-- leave me on the outskirts of success.

But as we all know—the current model is not sustainable.

My desire for more, for sustainable learning, along with the growing unrest by others who are not in the standardized top 20 percent will inevitably challenge the system until the system finally decides to challenge itself.