Should the role of education be to prepare students for working life, or to broaden their mind? On one note, it can be agreed upon that many educators have done their best at preparing students for working life. These days it is a lot easier to prepare oneself for a job than to actually find one, and while it is convenient to be prepared for life, it is also the educator’s duty to provide more for their students than what they already know. The general idea of knowledge is to broaden one’s mind past what one already knows. The best way to accomplish this is to have the best educators help lead students on that path.
Educators should be teaching students all the concepts of which life has to offer. In society, many students grow up knowing about topics such as the atomic bomb, or red blood cells; education as such involving facts, hard evidence, or even scientific studies. Though teaching these sorts of lessons may indeed help a student achieve great ideals, educators can do better. In order for a student’s mind to be broadened, that mind must be opened to other such possibilities besides what has already been taught by past educators. If students were in fact to be taught the same lectures and same lessons from here on until the future, it seems likely that society would achieve the minimum standards due to the lack of capacity for the brain to reach beyond its best potential.
It is argued that the human brain only uses as much as ten percent of itself. It may very well be that the human brain has only reached ten percent of its capacity, because the education system hasn’t extended past that ten percent of all human knowledge. So to extend learning and the human mind, education must broaden the minds of students. That missing ninety percent has been benched for too long, and has been sitting on the side-lines waiting to achieve greatness, merely because the education system hasn’t been expanded past already known knowledge. In author Robynne Boyd’s article, ‘Do people only use 10% of their brains?’ she stated, “Ultimately, it’s not that we use 10 percent of our brains, merely that we only understand about 10 percent of how it functions.” The first step to understanding a problem, is to figure out a way to solve it, thus evolving the education system to a more broadened outlook.
Many would argue that society has already experienced all it can in life, as to which students have learned enough cultures, and formulas to last a lifetime. All are a useful aspect in day to day activities, however this reaches only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to experiencing the full knowledge of what a person’s mind can truly accomplish given the chance. And to end the final statement, it may be said that in life, there are also roles for each person to fill. The role of the educators is to provide students with the hope that they can exceed their maximum potential within themselves and for others. It is the job and duty of educators to accomplish this, simply for the sake of future society, and where people in society would like it to lead. It does not seem predictable that the engineers or technicians of our society would accomplish this task, whereas the educators are what allow students to develop, and to grow up more knowledgeable with their minds broadened past that ten percent. As Professor Trelawney once said, “Together we shall cast ourselves into the future.”