A Dark Legacy Grows Darker: The Economy and our Education

This short article/essay, like most writing could be better with additional research and I may return to it at a later point in time. I suppose you could consider this a rough outline of a longer essay due to follow. Education and the economy are buzz wor

Being a person of college age, I look back on the practice of apprenticeship with longing. It used to be that a person seeking education would find a master in his desired field of study and learn to follow in his footsteps- hopefully expanding on related topics with innovative ideas of his own.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that education has become something more sought after, but I'm not buying this one-size-fits-all package that the current institutions of higher education are trying to sell. Each student is a unique individual with their own style of learning and their own form of intelligence. One can't expect to stick one hundred people into a room with one professor and have them all progress equally as quick nor earn grades that were standardized by a student very different from themselves.

Not to mention that tuition costs are ever-rising as the average family income is on the decline. We are now reverting back to an archaic time when only the wealthy elite could afford to expand their already expansive horizons through a college education. Students of the diminishing middle class are finding themselves left ignored in the shadows of their uper class counter parts. The system is in dire need of reform.

If this is sounding familiar to you, know that you're not alone. This latest trend is fashioned after a time not so long past in our country's history. During the late 1800's to early 1900's America saw its rich grow richer and its poor grow poorer. We are reminded of this in our own time with the recent bailouts given to now infamous car moguls. Now, I understand that these bailouts were given to insure the survival of an already faltering economy. What I am asking is- should there have been a need for them in the first place? After all, flying CEOs via private jet to a meeting a few states away is hardly what I would call a wise investment.

Similarly in the early 1900s, we saw wealthy bankers and businessmen building larger, more elaborate mansions while the average American was struggling to keep food on his family's table. All of this was followed by the infamous stock market crash that led to the Great Depression- a memory that still haunts our nation's collective conscience.

We are now in a state of recession and have acquired a national debt even larger than that of the darkest time in America's economic history. We are spending more money on war than peace and neglecting the future of our youth by asking them to pay money back that they never had to begin with. History warned us that this could happen. We chose to ignore it and are now paying the consequences.