College Inc.

I started out at college like we all do, chasing a good GPA while negotiating life. And I succeeded. I ended up on the Dean’s List, an honor bestowed on a chosen few. Since then, I’ve been grossly entangled in a battle to maintain that prestige and it’s made me do things I’d never have imagined myself doing. But is it all worth it? Is a good GPA worth the hype? Is it worth losing your friends for? Is it worth losing your dignity for added dignity? Are we fighting for a worthwhile cause?

Now I know that there’s always been much said against our education system. And some of it deserves merit whereas the rest is just the complaints of lazy losers like myself. But this lazy loser has something to say, and he thinks it’s worthwhile.

My grandfather used to say, “All a good classroom needs is one committed teacher and one committed student.” And we have a lot of committed students and a lot of committed teachers in our colleges. But what are they committed to? Teachers to compensation and students to grades? Is it a problem with the individuals that partake in the transaction of knowledge in these institutions? Or is it symptomatic or a much larger problem with the system?

Whatever happened to teachers who were wholly emotionally invested in their students? Whatever happened to students who would respect their teachers and take genuine interest in them and not just what they were teaching? Whatever happened to the mutual respect between these two populations? Where did we go wrong? Where did we lose the way?

I believe learning and teaching, this transfer of knowledge, is the purest and noblest of our human traditions. It is a way of transcending our own mortality. One generation passes all it knows to the next before it expires. Knowledge builds on knowledge. Wisdom builds on wisdom. And humanity becomes wiser and smarter as time passes by. That is what has protected us from the corrosive passage of time. That is why humanity has come so far, out of the cave and into the skyscraper, always reaching for newer heights. But somehow, along the way, we ended up commercializing and quantifying the process. Learning ability tuned into grades. Teaching ability turned into paychecks. And we got dumber and dumber.

But is there any hope? Colleges are admitting higher and higher numbers of applicants now, especially in our country. The ever shrinking teacher-student ratios mean that college instructors really lack the freedom to take genuine individual interest in their students. For them, it’s all a struggle to scrape out the cream from the rest and meet grade quotas. Human beings have been reduced to Names and Roll Numbers on sheets of paper. The entire system serves as a sort of quality control process in an industry that manufactures students. Students who will go out into the world and fuel that very industry. They’ll play at life, something that they were never fully made to understand.

Now there are teachers who really understand the gravity of this situation. They see how grade requirements are sucking the souls out of their pupils. But these noble human beings are trapped in a system they can’t really change. And I think it’s unfair of us students to demand them to do so when most of us don’t want to put in the effort to understand these people. An easy A is all we want, and once we have it, off we go. Is it because we lack faith in the system? Is it because we don’t really want to fix the system, we just want to one-up it. Do we derive some misplaced sense of achievement in winning a race that we never really chose to run?

Perhaps this is why we have built a dog eat dog world. Perhaps all this competition is making us uncaring, inconsiderate human beings who never really try to understand others until we find ourselves in trouble. Perhaps this, “It’s not enough that I should succeed; others should fail” thinking is the cause of most of our problems today.

Winston Churchill once said, “My education was interrupted only by my schooling.” Which is so true. We take so much away from every living moment and then we enter a classroom, ready to sell our own mothers for an extra mark. And that extra mark makes us happy. So coming back to where I started off, is it all worth it?

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