Alivia Overmyer

Lucia Elden
English 111
18 November 2015
Students Fixation on Getting a Degree
The capitalistic, consumerist, American culture that most students have grown up in has
been conditioned to accept has unfortunately led to the belief, that money is more important than
learning. The fixation for a degree affects a students learning by how students will take classes,
and fly through the assignments to just finish the class in the meantime they are not paying
attention to what they are supposed to be learning, they are just trying to pass the class. Since
early childhood, students are told that you go to school to get a job, to make a good amount of
money. Whereas if they should be told anything related to money, it probably should be, you
go to school to learn, so you are able to gain the knowledge, which in turn will aid you in settling
and keeping a satisfying well paid job one day.
When some children become a certain age, they are semi-forced to go to school for
approximately thirteen years. After that, they get to choose whether they want to continue their
education or not. But in this generation is that really the case? In Chuck Bowdens Sociology 101
class, he showed a documentary called Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood.
In this documentary it talks about how starting at a young age kids are affected by marketing,
they just do not realize it. Everywhere you look in an elementary school there is some type of
marketing (i.e. the Got Milk posters, or Kellogg posters). There are so many ways marketers get
to kids without the children noticing. This can be one of the many reasons children in this
generation think they have to go to college. Many advertisements suggest going to college to get

a good job. The biggest things children (mostly teenagers) hear is, what occupation do you want
to pursue? Majority of them will answer with a certain occupation then say because it makes a
pretty good amount of money.
This is where the issue in learning is in this generation. Going to school and going to
college, should not be forced or thought of as going just to get this certain degree to hope one
day to be making a good amount of money. Going to school and going to college, should be
about wanting to learn something new. In Jack Mezirows, an emeritus professor of adult
education at Columbia University, article Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice, he talks
about how learning is to be able to take your own opinions/ thoughts. In the article, he states, In
contemporary societies we must learn to make our own interpretations rather than act on the
purposes, beliefs, judgements, and feelings of others (268). This quote connects to this concept
of how students should want to learn something. And yet as Bowdens class documentary
pointed out, finding/ sticking to their own thinking is difficult as they have to fight all the earlier
messages.
In addition to students trying to hear themselves over this culture of advertisement, they
also need to hear themselves over many of their past teachers. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator,
talks about how he dislikes this thing called the banking concept. In Freires book called,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he explains the banking concept as:
Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize
mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into
"containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more
completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teachers she is. The more
meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students

they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the

students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.
In other words, teachers are thinking of students as an empty job that needs to be filled with as
much knowledge as the teacher possibly, can fill it with. The fuller that jar is the better that
student is. Freire did not like the idea of this banking concept. He believed that students can
think on their own, and that students need to put their education in their own hands, rather than
the teacher deciding their education for the students and thinking for them. The teachers
thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students thinking. The teacher cannot
think for her students, nor can she impose her thought on them. Freire is saying that the students
need to ask questions so they are understanding (learning). Rather than teachers just telling the
students and assuming they had just understand everything she just lectured.
As a result of the consumerist focus, and silencing of self-thought it is not surprising that
students want to go to school to get a degree so that people can make money becomes an issue
for the students learning in many of ways. One of the first ways is the students will not pay
attention. If the students are just going to the class to pass, then that does not mean that they are
there to try and learn anything, they are just showing up. This can affect the student because if
they are just going through the assignments and tests just to get through the class, then they are
not planning on remembering it for as long as they can. This can affect them if they get a job and
need to recall that information. For example, in elementary the students are taught the metric
system. But if they just remember them for that time, they will have a hard time through middle
school and high school. If they want to pursue a career as a construction worker, they will also
have a hard time, because they did not try to learn their metric system in elementary school. The
students were just trying to rush through that part of the class to continue to the next part.

Overcoming a lifetime of different frames of references is very difficult. Both Freire and
Mezirow would advocate self-reflection and openness to transformative learning. Freire thinks
that students need to be taking their education into their own hands. In chapter two of his book
he discusses, Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection
and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings only when
engaged in inquiry and creative transformation. Freire is saying that in education students
should be taking their education into their own hands, so that way they are understanding what
they are being taught, also called learning. An example of taking their education into their own
hands would be like, asking questions, comparing what they are learning to life events so they
have a better understanding, or even by research what they are being taught to see if there is
another way to understand it better. By doing this the students are self-referencing. By
understanding what they are being taught by self-reflecting the students are using the idea of
transformative learning. Mezirow would also believe that students need to take their education
into their own hands through their frame of reference to be able to learn. Mezirow states
Transformative learning is the process of effecting change in a frame of reference. Adults have
acquired a coherent body of experience- associations, concepts, values, feelings, conditioned
responses- frames of reference that define their world (268). Mezirow is saying that in order to
get to a certain point (in this case learning) you have to try to try to find a way to understand it in
your own way. It could be anything from comparing it to a belief, feeling, or even a past
experience.
In conclusion, students are taught from a young as that they are supposed to go to school,
to get a degree, and then begin a career that will assist in fulfilling lifelong dreams and goals.
There are even marketing strategies that are put into place for drawing attention to the need for a

college degree in order for the young adult to get a good job. This should not be the focus for the
students. The student should instead be focused on the learning aspect which should be the most
important thing to them.

Work Cited
Freire, Paulo. Paulo Freire: Chapter 2 Pedagogy of the oppressed. Composing
Knowledge:Readings for College Writers. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2007.
Web.
Mezirow, Jack. Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice. Exploring
Relationships: Globalization and Learning in the 21 Century. Pearson Learning
st

Solutions, 2013. 268-274. Print.