Formal education tends to restrain our minds and spirits rather than set them free.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
Formal education is admittedly one of the most critical achievements of the contemporary world. Until recently, education was a privilege of few belonging in the upper class of the social ladder. Only the last century formal education has been established as compulsory in the Western world and people are required by the law to completer several years of education. The question that arises is: is this achievement of our times conducive to the development of individual thought, critical thinking, and intellectual advancement or it serves only to restrain the person’s mind who is consistently adopting and aping ideas presented in class. The answer dwells somewhere in the middle. Formal education gives an abundance of stimuli to an individual, which he or she is responsible to individually process and further explore to develop his/her own theories and ideas.
Formal education has the potential to bridle instead of setting people’s minds free. This is because, more often than not, teachers and university professors tend to try to instill their own way of the thinking to their students. In other words, they present the study material from their own point of view. For example, a psychology professor who has study for years psychopathology using the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, will present this manual as the golden rule for the classification of mental disorders. Therefore, it behooves the student to conduct her own independent research, reading often literature with divergent points of view, to develop their own ideas about how psychopathology should be conceptualized and whether a specific domain of study demands revisiting. Thus, formal education provides a cornucopia of stimuli, some of them presented as widely accepted rules and others as more open to interpretation, which the students have the duty to evaluate making their own research. This way students can avoid having their minds subdued by formal education institutions.
The other way formal education can contain individual thinking is by discouraging independent voices to be heard in the classroom. It is not only the teacher who tries to ingrain her own viewpoints to the students. Often, educational institutions are obliged to present a nationally defined curriculum with specific directions about how the course should be taught. The educational system in Greece is an example of such practices. In this case, all the students are expected to be exposed to the same material and have little saying about what they would desire to learn. Hence, critical thinking and individual ideas are less valued as they diverge from the predetermined direction conferred by the government. Such laws significantly restrict human minds and the weight comes entirely to the individual student to seek further resources out of class to satisfy their curiosity and learn about subjects not included in the national curriculum.
In conclusion, formal education, although at significantly varying degrees in the different countries, has the potential to hamper intellectual development and learning, because of the way it is designed. However, it does provide a variety of stimuli of which the students can take advantage and seek further knowledge outside of class.
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Transition Words or Phrases used:
hence, however, if, so, still, therefore, thus, well, for example, in conclusion, in other words
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 20.0 19.5258426966 102% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 7.0 12.4196629213 56% => OK
Conjunction : 16.0 14.8657303371 108% => OK
Relative clauses : 7.0 11.3162921348 62% => More relative clauses wanted.
Pronoun: 29.0 33.0505617978 88% => OK
Preposition: 73.0 58.6224719101 125% => OK
Nominalization: 20.0 12.9106741573 155% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2779.0 2235.4752809 124% => OK
No of words: 510.0 442.535393258 115% => OK
Chars per words: 5.44901960784 5.05705443957 108% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.75217629947 4.55969084622 104% => OK
Word Length SD: 3.06339590384 2.79657885939 110% => OK
Unique words: 269.0 215.323595506 125% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.527450980392 0.4932671777 107% => OK
syllable_count: 868.5 704.065955056 123% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.59117977528 107% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 6.0 6.24550561798 96% => OK
Article: 5.0 4.99550561798 100% => OK
Subordination: 3.0 3.10617977528 97% => OK
Conjunction: 1.0 1.77640449438 56% => OK
Preposition: 6.0 4.38483146067 137% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 22.0 20.2370786517 109% => OK
Sentence length: 23.0 23.0359550562 100% => OK
Sentence length SD: 65.6512354091 60.3974514979 109% => OK
Chars per sentence: 126.318181818 118.986275619 106% => OK
Words per sentence: 23.1818181818 23.4991977007 99% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.36363636364 5.21951772744 84% => OK
Paragraphs: 4.0 4.97078651685 80% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 7.80617977528 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 10.0 10.2758426966 97% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 4.0 5.13820224719 78% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 8.0 4.83258426966 166% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.150027650158 0.243740707755 62% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0439799214734 0.0831039109588 53% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0374896419981 0.0758088955206 49% => Sentences are similar to each other.
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0904707001092 0.150359130593 60% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0340427928145 0.0667264976115 51% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 15.8 14.1392134831 112% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 39.67 48.8420337079 81% => OK
smog_index: 11.2 7.92365168539 141% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.4 12.1743820225 110% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 14.63 12.1639044944 120% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 9.55 8.38706741573 114% => OK
difficult_words: 154.0 100.480337079 153% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 16.5 11.8971910112 139% => OK
gunning_fog: 11.2 11.2143820225 100% => OK
text_standard: 12.0 11.7820224719 102% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Better to have 5/6 paragraphs with 3/4 arguments. And try always support/against one side but compare two sides, like this:
para 1: introduction
para 2: reason 1. address both of the views presented for reason 1
para 3: reason 2. address both of the views presented for reason 2
para 4: reason 3. address both of the views presented for reason 3
para 5: reason 4. address both of the views presented for reason 4 (optional)
para 6: conclusion.
Rates: 83.33 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 5.0 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.