Big Expectations for School

Obama's view on school is that schools can provide the opportunity to discover your talents. He delivers a great speech but his solution seems too easy. He says that we can have the best schools in the world; easy to say, but what are the steps he is willing to take to create the best schools in the world. What is the best school in the world, relative to him? Obama wants schools to prepare students for the future, to get good jobs and to get the economy going. Even if some students have the best education out there, there are other factors like racism that stop them from getting the job they want. And if everyone gets what they want, the economy is going to be in high demand for the jobs that people are skeptic about applying for. Obama names the people who were determined to finish high school and go to college. Sure, school can teach you to be persistent but is college necessary to get a good job? What do we learn in college that cannot be learned earlier in our lives?

The article about liberal arts also argue about career but at a personality level. Schools mold our ideas, help us learn to discover ideas, and teach us to think creatively. I don't think art is teaching students a necessary skill in the workplace. What corporations look for are practical solutions to problems and if studying art is enforcing imagination skills, then liberal arts may not be all that important. But other than the workplace, I think studying art is a nice personal hobby. Thomas Friedman implies that schools train us to become tools of corporations across the world like Intel. If corporations cannot get the best engineers in their own country, then they will get them out of other countries such as China. I think school is also encouraging students to compete; it has become sort of a battlefield among students not only in schools themselves but throughout the world. Friedman suggests to step up the education a notch and compete with the education around the world. Even schools within America are competing against each other to see whose students get into the best colleges.