Essay/Term paper: Education: past, present, and future

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Education

Education: Past, Present, and Future


Education, without it we would all be mindless wonders wandering around the
globe. Education is an important factor in our lives, but the past, present, and
future of education is changing. And change it will until our education system
is the best in the world.

In the past, Education in America was plain and simple. We've all heard
the stories of how our ancestors used to have to walk to school 5 miles in the
snow in the heat of summer. These shameless exagerations were meant for us to
think that school back in the "good ole days" was very dificult and surpassed
the level of difficulty students today have. In reality, school, although most
early schools were combonation classes with a variety of age groups as students.
Almost each individual was given an equal amount of personal help from the
teacher. Also, life wasn't as complecated as they are now. One teacher would
teach the whole class a limeted variety of subjects such as arithmatic and
english. Education was just eaiser when it first became popular.

Nowadays, in the present, school not only is a place to learn, it's a
place to stress out. As I walk through the halls all students seem to have that
academic nervousness. If you listen to the conversations that go on in the hall
it's always, "Ohh my gosh, Becky! I'm going to have a fat cow! I think I'm
getting a B in my chemistry class, and that is going to ruin my record."
Pressure is constantly put upon students to get "straight A's" It is very rare
when a student will not shoot for an A on a quiz. It's human nature to succeed,
but with the pressure put on us by the teachers, parents, peers, and colleges,
it's a heavy load to handle.

Now, scientists recently did an expiriment. They placed a child in a
room with some brand new toys. They left him there for a couple of hours and he
did not play with them. The scientists puzzeled took the boy aside and asked him
why he did not play with the toys. The boy replied that he did not want to break
them. So, scientists then took another child and placed him in a room filled
with horse manure. The boy was having fun swimming around in it, having a blast
with the horse manure. When the scientists asked the boy why he played with the
horse manure, the boy replied, "Well, with all of this horse manure, there has
to be a pony somwhere." This story best relates to our education system. Now
while students may think that school is a waste of time, it has been proven that
it is really the key to lead us to the pony at the end of the rainbow. While we
may not like school, it will always benifit us in the long run.

The furture of education is changing ever so rapidly. New classes are
starting to emerge from the midst of old traditional classes that many new
students have failed. It may be hard for some of us to face, but some students
just can not learn the same why as our parents did. Today, students need more
hands on projects. They need things they can relate to the real world. Other
then just learning concepts, we should be able to learn how, when, and why we
should apply those concepts into everyday things. Now, i'm not saying we stray
away from traditional methods in the future. I am saying that what we all need
to do as a group is find a way to import those traditional methods in to
futuristic teaching, and use the traditional way of educating as a building base
for new methods in education. It can relate to a table, the new methods of
educating being the legs and the traditional way, the table top. You need both
the legs and the table top before you can have a complete table. If you take one
piece away you are left with a worthless pile of wood, but when you combine all
of the pieces together, the table begins to have some use and worth to it.

Education is something that has the biggest value of anything in the
world. It is an ideal that without it, we would never be able to live the way we
do today. It has come from a small, simple school, to a key to the future in
only the span of years.