Accreditation against education is a topic/situation that continues to germinate in our country today. Our future posterity is based solely on the whims and needs of corporate America, at least it seems so.
Let’s take a look at the demise of our education system as seen by several Philadelphia college professors, shall we?
There is a lot of hope. “Something is going to change,” Randy LoBasso says of Professor Debra Leigh Scott. “We have reached a tipping point, we have lost consciousness!” She says that the ability to transmit knowledge is a very big thing to lose. No one seems to be able to understand the importance of what it means to lose the ability to correctly transmit knowledge to another, especially a younger person, students in particular. Is there a winner? Is there someone, something, some entity that will benefit from the death of education?
The American Association of University Professors, in a report, found that between 1975 and 2003, the number of tenure positions in higher education dropped from 56.8% to 35.1%, according to LoBasso. About one million professors across the country have the skills to teach up to eleven classes per college semester at any number of schools. The (mentioned above) number of classes may seem like an enormous workload: with the paycheck of three thousand dollars per class, could any teacher make ends meet? The decline of full-time professorships, since the 1970s, has slapped many teachers with a reality check.
The report goes on to point out the realization of students having to resort to email message exchanges between teacher and student. “Students have little or no personal access to the faculty beyond the classroom,” says the interviewed professor. Says Scott, “The student learning under an overburdened professor may be in a worse situation: being taught by dedicated but degraded professors with no offices, who are hired semester by semester by today’s colleges and universities for salaries less than the paychecks of the employees”. from K-Mart or McDonald’s.”
Professor Scott shares those sentiments based on the current report and experience of a blog chronicling someone else’s work at various universities in the greater Philadelphia area. “We are all being screwed over by corporate universities, where the needs of students and the value of professors are minimized by the pursuit of profit, profit that benefits no one.
The death of “student-teacher-administration relations at American University” (i.e., “planned disenfranchisement; interdepartmental communication conspiracy: failure or simple mistake?” Scott says, August 18, 2007 , relies on contingent workers and outsourcing, just like a US corporation The professor and an associate said they have found evidence of corporations moving in and taking over what is being taught in college and university classrooms Lots of cutbacks Drastic, deep cuts in state education grants and budgets have forced universities to increasingly rely on corporate donations—they come with quotas…with strings.Corporate chain holders want research subjects for drug companies, making large donations that are tax-deductible Then they guide graduate students in conducting research ones at the request of said corporations. Students inadvertently become underpaid or unpaid labor on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies.
After graduation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (and according to the Financial Aid Organization’s Student Loan Debt Clock, about $88.2 billion owed) they become scared robots, slaves , dutiful workers who can only find work in the same corporations that have financed the laboratories, buildings and scholarships of the schools they attend.
The circumstances of this created culture in which “cheating and laziness” of both students and teachers have become the norm in recent years. It is also perpetuated by the outsourcing climate and its reliance on colleges and universities that make the hiring and financial decisions. Today, online businesses that base their existence and continuity on writing student papers have become extremely industrialized players. These companies make millions of thousands of dollars by cheating: they create so-called original essays based on specific instructions provided by other cheating students’ writing. One pseudonymous author stated in an ‘Inside Higher Education’ article: “You’d be shocked at the incompetence of students’ writing. I’ve seen the word ‘hopeless’ misspelled in every way you can imagine, and these students… They don’t write a compelling shopping list, yet they’re in grad school.”
Damn… and you thought it was bad at the high school level, huh?
In another interview, a Cleveland university faculty member commented, “I have to believe the university system can be saved. I have children and I’m not going to sit idly by and watch their educational future disappear.” In other words, the dead raising the dead.
Experience gets you nowhere these days. Over the past twenty years, another college professor says that while working as an English professor part-time at various Philadelphia-area universities, she found time to publish a book and provide editing, writing, and corporate consulting services to business clients. She has even written plays, which were eventually produced. Although, when the market crashed in 2008, her resume wasn’t enough. She lost her luxurious suburban home and had to move into an apartment with strangers. She found an apartment listing site on the Internet. “I was like a lot of people, she says she, you think you’re going to find a full-time position, you really think it’s going to happen, then you realize it’s not going to happen… it’s a horrible day.”
Years ago, as I reflect on this writing, as a struggling student at CCP, I had the opportunity to come across one such part-time worker who was assigned to teach English 101. I knew that as an overworked person, this teacher was stressed. . The teacher even went so far as to announce to the class that she had several run-ins with students of Color. She went on to say that the aforementioned group had threatened her. This particular teacher also demonstrated that she was conflicted, biased, and disillusioned based on her experiences with ethnic groups. This woman actually accused me of plagiarism… a paper I submitted for a writing assignment. Now how do you plagiarize yourself? I submitted an English essay from a previous class, in which I received an ‘A’. I wrote the article for an assignment for another class at school: a business class. The document was based on an experience found during my tenure in the transportation industry. It was a good essay, I must admit. Needless to say, I didn’t pass your English 101 course. I suffered the first, only, and last ‘F’ in a series of A, B’s throughout my college career… due to racism! The complaints were, of course, filed to no avail.
Compositions in English were always a strong point for me in school, from elementary school to high school. In my opinion, we need to get back to the basics of education at all levels, starting with kindergarten, or we will face a never-ending trend towards the educational graveyard and come in last when compared to the educational world at large. .
Until next time…