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Alivia Overmyer
Lucia Elden
English 111
4 December 2015
College Learning: Students Missing the Point
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. Students are taking classes just so they can just fly through the assignments just be
done with the class. In the meantime, they are not paying attention to what they are supposed to
be learning. Since early childhood, students are told that you go to school to get a job, to make a
good amount of money. If the students are being told anything along those lines, it probably
should be something along the lines of, 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.
The point of college is to further grow one's learning in education, to help succeed in a career
one day. Which is where students are forgetting. Without paying attention in classes, students are
not helping themselves to one day succeed to the best of their ability when they move onto their
careers.
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 today's generation, is that really the case? In Chuck Bowdens Sociology
101 class at Mid-Michigan Community College, he showed a documentary called Consuming
Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood. In the documentary, it talks about how kids starting
at a young age are affected by marketing, however the kids just do not realize it. Everywhere one

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looks in an elementary school, and an observer will see some type of marketing in every corner
of the school. For example, the Got Milk posters, or Kellogg posters are only some of the many
ways marketers get to kids without the children noticing. Marketing can be one of the many
reasons children in today's generation think they have to go to college. Because of marketing,
college is viewed as a place where students go as a place in order to get a higher paying job
instead of appreciating it as a privilege/ place of learning and knowledge like it used to be.
College is not just a way stop on the way to a corporate job to get out of the way, college is a
place for any student who wants a better education.
Getting an education, should not be forced or thought of as going just to get a certain
degree to hope one day to be making a good amount of money. Going to college should be about
wanting to learn something new. Jack Mezirow, a professor of adult education at Columbia
University, wrote an article on a similar topic. In his article Transformative Learning: Theory to
Practice, he talks about how learning is actually to be able to take your own thoughts and
opinions what he calls autonomous thinking. 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). The autonomous thinking concept of how students
should want to learn something rather than being forced to learn. For some students it is very
hard to do what a professor is asking for them to do, because of how they were taught to do
something in high school. In the documentation, in Bowdens sociology class, it pointed out the
sticking to the student's own thoughts is difficult as they have to fight all the earlier messages.
In addition to students trying to hear themselves over the culture of advertisement, they
also need to hear themselves over many of their past teachers. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator,

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talks about how he dislikes something called the banking concept. In Freires book called,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he explains the banking concept:
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 the 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. By doing this it can affect the students,
because if they are just going through the assignments and tests just to get through the class, then

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they are not planning on remembering it for as long as they can. Which can affect them if they
get a job and need to recall the specific information. For example, in elementary the students are
taught the metric system. But if the students had only remembered the metric system for that
time being, then the students will have a hard time throughout middle school and high school. If
the students decides to pursue a career as a construction worker, they will have a hard time,
because they did not learn the metric system in elementary school they had just memorized it for
the time being.
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. 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

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that define their world (268). In order to get to a certain point (in this particular case learning)
students 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. Degrees should not be the focus for
the students. The student should instead be focused on the point of college. The point of college
is the learning aspect which should be the most important thing to the students.

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Work Cited
Consuming Kids the Commercialization of Childhood. Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, 2009. Film.
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 21st Century. Pearson Learning
Solutions, 2013. 268-274. Print.