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Stephan Morgan
Synthesis Paper
12/13/2015

Education Not Molding Every Young Mind

Students are faced with many obstacles while enduring their educational journey.
Many students may progress smoothly and understand material easily in most classes.
However, the same cannot be said for many students who hit walls and have barriers
that disconnect them from learning certain subjects. There are many variables closely
related with this issue, some include teaching styles, learning disabilities, and
motivational issues to name a few. Albert Einstein as a student had difficulties learning
certain subjects other than math and physics. If his teachers could have come up with a
way to help relate the information he needed to learn to math or physics which came
easy to him, maybe he could have been accepted into a university instead of working in
a research facility. Teachers and students must both be striving to find relatability and
engagement in order to assure success for a higher majority of students in each
classroom.
Responsibility for learning falls both on the teacher as well as the students. By
the time a student enters high school, he or she should know what teaching style they
learn best with. Teachers in turn must also be able to adapt to learning styles of all
students. According to UMass Dartmouth College, there are three major different
learning styles. Auditory, Visual, and Kinetic. Auditory learners learn by speaking or
hearing the material in some fashion. Visual learners learn better by seeing pictures or
graphs when learning new subjects. Kinetic learners are students that learn best by
hands-on experiences for instance a lab in a science class.Jack Mezirow, an adult
education professor at Columbia University, believes in a theory of transformative

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learning. This theory states that people learn within their frame of reference and can
learn four different ways. People will either learn and enhance their point of view on a
subject if the information fits comfortable in our bias. Another way people learn is by
creating a new point of view, a third way is by changing our point of view by having
interactions with someone or something that changes or prejudice point of view. The
fourth way people learn according to Mezirow is hard to find in most people, but it is
when they are aware of our own bias towards others and certain topics, so everyone
can directly affect how the information is processed and think critically.(Mezirow 270)
Teachers who can incorporate these different learning styles into their classroom will
definitely see the majority of their students engaged and successful within the class.
Teachers do not take on the full responsibility of making sure every student is
learning the material and motivated to be successful. Students, especially at the college
level must be willing to do their part. A student cannot come into a class and expect the
teacher who has more than likely fifty plus students in one subject to be on top of every
single student throughout the course. There needs to be a stop to the laziness and
cool aspect of putting learning down. In todays classrooms it is normal for students to
feel odd if they are interested in school. Mark Edmundson a professor of english at the
University of Virginia says, Most of my students seem desperate to blend in, to look
right, and not to make a spectacle of themselves(Edmundson 285). This is Edmundson
talking about how in his classroom experience he notices that many of his students are
more concerned with fitting in with the crowd and not be the weird person who actually
shows passion in school subjects. People spend the first chunk of their lives in a
classroom and learning environment. Mezirow would find that the students Edmundson

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is encountering in his classrooms are trying to stick to their own generalized idea of how
a college student should behave. With their young minds college students should be
eager to learn and to open their minds to a whole world of information that is new and
exciting. However, as can be seen by both professors it is quite the opposite. Students
are too busy worrying about grades and being accepted by their peers rather than try
and absorb as much information they can to help make them a more well-rounded
individual which is what they paying thousands of dollars for. It should be a place where
students are encouraged to ask questions and to feel normal when things are hard to
understand or do not come as easy as some of the other students. Reject the
confusion and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe.(Rose 307)
says Mike Rose in his article I Just Wanna Be Average pertaining to students who
have difficulty learning in classrooms and become a target for school systems that are
put in place to provide safe haven and comfort for students that are having trouble in
school. More often than not according to Rose these programs do not liberate you but
occupy you(Rose 307). There are many students who fall into this pit of despair while
in school and many of them do not end their schooling well or even at all. If someone is
not making sure these programs are filled with people who can handle troubled students
and cannot help them find peace in their frustration of not learning as easy as other
students, then they must be replaced. These students may just be having trouble
learning the subjects because of the teaching styles of the classroom, especially at a
young age when there could possibly be one to three teachers for most subjects. If a
student is falling behind and a teacher can see they are having trouble grasping the
material, finding out how that student learns best should be the first step.

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There is a huge epidemic of students lacking the drive to improve themselves.

This can be closely related to the idea that comes across many times in ones
educational path. Adults, peers, and even teachers, use words that should never be
spoken when it comes to something as important as education. Just make sure you
pass or Are you able to drop and get into an easier class. Talking like this coming
from teachers or parents and especially friends, is creating a world of lazy and do the
bare minimum people. Everyone, especially college students are just paying for a
grade. There is no drive to challenge ones academic capacity like you hear about in the
past. Many of students are so focused on the next step or class, so focused on getting
at least the minimum grade to pass so they have the prerequisite to continue on. Every
semester there is a point when students can register for classes for the next semester. It
never fails there are always people jumping right on Rate my Professor to find the
easiest and most forgiving professor possible. This professor easily fills up and probably
receives many emails from students hoping to get into he/she class. According to an
article on Huffington Post by Eric Gorski, The research of more than 2,300
undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the
key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their
sophomore years. This is in close relation to the lack of passion for learning. In order to
learn one must have the desire to. You cannot take the easy road and expect to come
out with the same knowledge as someone who was challenged and worked a lot harder
in a class that you may have seen as a cake walk. This idea that it is okay to just pass
and earn a degree in the least effective way possible is going to make everyone
including employers lose trust in degrees if they are somewhat easy to obtain. Tests

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may be given out, or difficult questions may be asked in interviews to test knowledge
and that is when most people will be weeded out because they may have not actually
learned anything in the years they were in college. Now some people may have spent
thousands of dollars and hours in hopes of getting a good job right out of college, only
to find that they wasted all that time and money by doing the minimum.
Being successful through making yourself a better more well-rounded individual
that can contribute positively to society is the end point everyone has in mind when they
look at every student and younger generation. Not every student is going to reach that
point on the same path, some may struggle more than others, and some may falter and
become lost. These are the students that do not fit the molding that has tried producing
successful individuals for many years now. Students, teachers, and all adults must
make sure that each kid knows that it is okay to learn differently and they must be
accommodated for. If there is ever a way to make sure every student has a chance to
be taught and to learn the way that they do best then every student will have the
opportunity to achieve their greatest level of academic potential, and that should be the
goal of every educator.

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Work Cited
Edmundson, Mark. On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored
College Students. Exploring Relationships: Globalization and Learning in the 21st
Century.

Mid Michigan Community College, Boston, 2013. 282-294. Print.

Finnegan, Leah. "45% Of Students Don't Learn Much In College." The Huffington Post
.

TheHuffingtonPost.com. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.

Mezirow, Jack. Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice Exploring Relationships:

Globalization and Learning in the 21st Century. Mid Michigan Community College,
Boston, 2013. 268-274. Print
Rose, Mike. I Just Wanna Be Average. Exploring Relationships: Globalization and Learning in
the 21st Century. Mid Michigan Community College, Boston, 2013. 295-312.
Print
Tips for Educators on Accommodating Different Learning Styles." How to Accommodate
Different Learning Styles. Umass. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.