In Suzanne Britt’s essay “Generation A+,” she tries to communicate to her readers the deficiency of student motivation and perseverance found in today’s world of Education. Students no longer strive to pursue knowledge, work hard, and earn grades, but instead seek only to pursue I higher GPA in the easiest possible way. Students have found the ease in using handicaps and poor excuses to get out of essentially pursuing education. Therefore, this generation has sarcastically been deemed the name “Generation A+,” when in fact we are nothing short of a generation that has become lazy and poorly informed.
Most would find Britt’s essay to be rude and one-sided yet, I found it to be a true prospective of today’s youth. Today’s students have lost their passion for learning and no longer take learning to be a serious issue. Because of the lack of drive and enthusiasm in today’s adolescence, education has gone from centuries of men and women enlightening the world to men and women simply getting by with second best. If this generation can only seek out the “easy A,” then how will generations to come know how to work at anything more then the “easy A.”
Britt’s essay is simply given a true view of student’s trying everything in order to simply pass the class. Yet, Britt realizes that time and again students have been given to many opportunities, with simple excuses and extreme measures. In Britt’s essay she say’s “Graduate school is really college, College is really high school, high school is really junior high-or even elementary school.” I agree today’s academic standards have changed, courses are getting easier and students are getting lazier, Even teachers are losing their standards as an educator. Coming from a college prep high school I expected more from a college experience. For myself some classes have been a challenge and others seem simply like review. Students spend much of their time in classrooms, but never really leave with the information. Has this generation forgot what learning is? I believe many of us only seek for the most part an undemanding way to earn a degree. The thinking for many students now is, as long as I get an A we don’t care and after we take a test the information no longer matters. We should want to inspire the next generation and create a legacy for ourselves, and not a generation that seems to only care about getting an A. As Britt said,” College is really like high school,” and I agree, right now as a student in 2009 I don’t feel challenged enough to think of college as college, but as high school.
For very few students education is more than getting that A, it’s about reaching a goal and pursing a higher education. I feel that I have and still do pursue to accomplish my education. I have pushed myself to achieve the very best for myself and to accomplish all of my goals I have set. Where as many others have grown up in schools and have had educators that let them simply get by with compromise of educational ability. Education may seem to be a burden often times, but there are times as students when we are able to learn about more than just required curriculum, but instead students get to learn about curriculum that pertains to their study. As a student I believe that the core curriculum schools are placing on students’ as a requirement is nothing short of pointless and time consuming. I believe that if students could spend more time studying what they are passionate about then more students would want to pursue education more eagerly.
Yet, I believe many other factors through years of education have placed a burden on learning. Such as various educators, I wish that teachers would have stressed the importance of learning in school. I also wish teachers would have stressed the importance of writing and grammar. Writing was never properly taught to myself and was never a main focus. Now I feel as if so many students don’t even know how to write a proper essay or even know the proper grammar to use in a paper. I never realized how much I was never taught especially in writing until one English class. The teacher expected us to know every major thing about composition, but teachers never stressed the importance of writing. I knew a few of the writing styles and other things I remembered from previous English teachers; but for this particular class it wasn’t enough to know just the basics and it was quite an eye opener.In the last paragraph Britt stresses, “If a teacher does not teach-and students do not learn-then the stately towers of academe become a little more than strip malls for shrewd shoppers.” We as a generation have forgotten what it means to educate and be educated. We have become infatuated with letter grades instead of the importance of what we take away from the classes and teachers. Yet, while we are concerned about the easiest way to get an A or pass a few classes, whose thinking about the next generation or the future Presidents or scientists. Will we have another leader willing to lead us to do great things or possibly run our nation into the ground? We as future leaders of this nation need to pursue education with passion and become “Generation Inspire” and not a generation full of failure.
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