Outline Critical Thinking Paper

Title: Concept of Education

Summary

The current education system, at its core, is designed to reinforce hierarchy, status, and obedience in a free-thinking population. A majority of the problems humanity is plagued with including debt, poverty, crime, unemployment, wars, racism, and climate change are part a consequence of lack in the education system. For humanity to progress and prosper as a whole the current system must be broken down.

Personal experience, why I decided to write about this and what I’m going to talk about:

As an adult I’m learning from mistakes that could have been prevented with knowledge. I’m looking around me and many of my peers are experiencing the same thing. Debt, health problems due to poor eating habits, negative thinking, poverty, crime just to name a few. A lot of what I learned in school wasn’t relatable, so over the years has been forgotten. I think there is knowledge that could gained from school and not just memorizing and forgetting. Often, we hear what “employers are seeking”, not enough “what will you seek as an employer”, “making you more attractive to potential employers.”

Why is this a worthy topic?

The current education system, at its core, is designed to reinforce hierarchy, status, and obedience in a free-thinking population. A majority of the problems humanity is plagued with including poverty, crime, unemployment, babies out of wedlock, diseases, wars, ethnicity, racism, and climate change are part a consequence of lack in the education system. For humanity to progress and prosper as a whole the current system must be broken down.

Thesis statement

Although the education system has improved there are still some changes I’d like to see. The education system still is a lot to be desired in the 21st century.

The current system has inhibited the growth of our country. These are changes I’d like to see in our education system.

The Hook in my presentation

A story on Kyle. Kyle is living at home with a single mother who works long hours and whose dad isn’t around much. He isn’t receiving much in the way of instruction or guidance at home; mom had no formal education beyond high school and dad attended college on an athletic scholarship but dropped out early on because it was too challenging academically.

Fast forward a few years, Kyle struggled through pre-K and kindergarten. This affected both his behavior and grades. His classmates were ahead of him; they were taught to reading and basic math at home. Kyle is held back but seeing his classmates advance without him continues to take a toll on him mentally. With his mental state declining, he’s sent to an alternative school. But in this alternative school Kyle takes a mental health course that improves his behavior, he takes Spanish and meets his best friend Jacob whose family is from Puerto Rico. He takes a physical education course that keeps him active, and he takes a fine arts class where he learns he’s a gifted artist and talented writer. He’s becomes more balanced mentally and physically and develops better social skills. In his life skills course, he was able to share ideas with his mom that improved both of their lives and now they help others. Kyle was able to skip the 4th grade and graduated 5th grade top of his class.

Take home message

Imagine the progress we can make as a country and the lifelong knowledge we could gain from an improved education system by adding subjects like mental health, history/ current events, finances, languages, physical education, and fine arts. Also, by transforming to online schooling prior to college and proving kindles vs books.

Or

Gain knowledge and liberate your mind from modern day slavery. Imagine the progress we can make as a civilization and the lifelong knowledge we could gain from an improved education system by adding subjects like mental health, history/ current events, finances, languages, physical education, fine arts, and life skills.

NOTES FROM PROFESSOR:

Jasmine,

I can tell you are passionate about your topic and that you believe a better education system can really enlighten and change people's lives. As a professor, I can only agree with you and this is definitely a worthy topic.

Because you are so passionate about it, you talked about it in broad terms that would take a few books to explore :) You only have a short presentation and a short paper to tackle this, so you need to narrow your scope a bit. Your thesis statement reflects this broadness and will need to be narrowed down.

What I gathered from your pitch is that, at its essence, your topic is that the current educational system helps perpetuate social inequalities. (If this is not what your focus is, please reformulate and refocus for your idea.) And you are offering some suggestions to make it better -- offer financial awareness courses, mental health awareness courses, etc... 

I would caution you again using the word "civilization" because I think what you're referring to is the American education system. There might be other countries that already offer such classes (some Scandinavian countries do, for instance) so it's not a question of civilization but of American culture.