Education for all!

As I may have mentioned before, my plan for my life is to become a teacher. I'm a firm believer in the idea that everyone has the capacity to try and at least somewhat succeed in school, and that regardless of career path, everyone should strive to be a life-long learner. That being said, my opinions on this week's topic may seem a bit predictable.

As Laura mentioned, Germany allows for (more or less) higher education paid for by the government/taxes. I think this is one of the best ideas that anyone has ever had. The biggest issue standing between people that want to contribute to society through some means that requires an education is the fact that most people can't afford to take four years to just take classes and focus on them. Most people that go to college in the US have to either a) get their financially well-off parents to foot the bill, b) take out a metric fuckton of student loans that they will likely never be able to fully pay off, c) somehow end up with scholarships to pay for everything, or d) work the entire time they're in school in a way that'll drastically slow down the pace that they can progress at.

Honestly, the fact that society expects everybody to have a degree before they can work any kind of job is more than a bit of a problem. But let's imagine for a second that we could eliminate that issue and provide government-paid higher education. The people that don't need to go on with their education to get into the field that they want to get into wouldn't bother with it if they didn't feel like it was necessary. Suddenly, that massive clog in the system is gone, and the people left at colleges are the people that really want to be there.

I think it would do our country a lot of good to allow people to continue their education without it being a financial concern. Just because it isn't necessary for their job, that doesn't mean that it can't be a contributing factor to being a well-rounded person. I might be veering into territory that's much too idealistic, but as everyone here knows, getting a college education is about more than career training. It's about being better prepared to interact with the real world. It's about absorbing as much new information as you can. It's about exposing yourself to different ideas that make you question the way you look at the world and really consider whether or not your way of thinking is right.

And isn't that what we all really want our society to be like?