Response Paper: On Schoolwork And The Struggle Against It (Essay Sample)

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Response Paper: On Schoolwork and the Struggle against It
According to Professor Cleaver, the current role and function of the higher education system are to transform human beings into workers who operate like machines. The professor argues that even though many institutions often clings to the ideology that they aim at personal enlightenment and crafting of students so that they can be valuable members of the society in future. Their current function is to transform human beings into workers who are disciplined in such a way that they do what they are told, and the way they are told to do it for the rest of their lives. They also live their lives knowing that they are living to their full potential. Thus higher education is just like any other factory that is expected to create products that are demanded by the market.
Professor Cleaver discusses that politics of higher education and those of the capitalist system of which the universities are an integral part are the leading societal institutions that have significantly influenced modern U.S Higher Education. Cleaver argues that these institutions have brought forth the educational structures and administrative rules, regulations, and policies that impose so much division, hierarchy, and competition as to breed wealth and poverty, snobbery and envy, arbitrary power and fear, secrecy and alienation, sycophancy and rebellion. The regulations and policy have substantially undermined collegiality within the higher learning institutions since it has molded the universities to be like factories that are expected to produce workers for the capitalist society.
Aside from teaching and learning, Professor Cleaver argues that the true role of teachers in higher education is to perform administrative duties. According to him, these administrative duties ought to entail providing such work to their respective departments or to the institution as a whole. “These service duties thus entail hiring new faculties, selecting new students for admission to graduate studies or the collective consultation of the faculty”. He further argues that this role has somehow been undermined and overlooked by the fact the universities have been transformed to look more like a processing factory rather than a higher learning institution
The professor is of the opinion that the duty of designing the course work should be left entirely on the professor teaching that particular field. He feels that when it comes to developing the curriculum constraints, there should not be any external force trying to influence it's designed as it is the case in most institution today which allows the higher authorities to intervene when it comes to setting the course requirement. He further argues that for students to receive quality education professors ought to be allowed to craft their own unique courses entirely form their own conception without being coerced to take the curriculum for the higher ranked schools as models. The professor is also of the opinion that using exams and grades to be the standard of choosing who has passed and who has failed is unfair. He argues that universities often use grades to force students to work hard on their own so that they can get grades to pass a course. This is not supposed to be the case since by doing so students are made to be like products within the assembly line of production companies which must pass through several stages before being termed complete.
The first alienation described by the professor is the alienation of teachers from their work due to the fact that the content they are supposed to teach is mainly predetermined by external forces. Moreover, they are also forced to grade the students using tests and exams to determine whether they have done a good job. The second alienation described is the alienation of a worker from a worker. The professor claims that they are pitted against their students from a position of power that is created by the artificial power hierarchy that has been adopted by the institutions. In this alienation, the ...