Author : Gabriel Rise
Almost needless to say there is a very marked difference between the education afforded the students at the colonial colleges and that provided for them at the present time. The supreme feature of that difference deserves special attention. It is that the students in the colonial colleges had their duties toward others emphasized for them while the students of the modern time are taught ever so much more about their rights. They hear much now about the supreme importance of the development of individuality and the bringing out of personality; then they had repeated for them over and over again that education's aim was the benefit of the community and the doing of good for their fellow men. The paramount purpose of education at the present time is to enable students to make a success of life.Success means above all the making of money. The supreme aim of education in the colonial times was to render students valuable to the community. Over and over again college documents of various kinds, charters, statutes, announcements, dwell on the fact that education was to be cultivated mainly, indeed almost wholly, for the purpose of producing suitable candidates for the ministry and the magistracy, so as to provide a mentally well trained pastorate for the churches and such candidates for political office as would assure honest administration as well as thoughtful consideration of the needs and rights of the people. Colonial educators without exception were intent on making students thoughtful for others rather than themselves while they provided the principles for the proper solution of political problems by men whose college training had been directed particularly toward making them honest, honorable, upright citizens and officials of the community.This training came between the ages of fifteen and twenty, just when adolescents are most impressionable, and when impressions produced are very likely to endure. This seems to us entirely too early for graduation from college and we have been prolonging the period of tutelage during which young men are not encouraged to assume their personal responsibilities but are left to take things as they come and to consider that the less they have to devote themselves to hard work the better it is for them. Our generation is inclined to think that college work completed at twenty or earlier is surely too young, but our forefathers' generations would inevitably have felt that our young men were wasting their time when they were only graduated from preparatory school at nineteen or so, and that they ought surely to have reached a higher mental development than this at that time of life. Above all there is in our time very little teaching of the principles of morality and of right conduct in life and still less emphasis on man's duties toward God and his neighbor as well as himself.The lack of this teaching has been noted by many modern educators who have emphasized the fact that young men need such training very much and yet agree that there is almost no place for it in education as organized at the present time. The years of life, fifteen to twenty, which students spent in college during the colonial period, particularly during the generation just before the Revolution, represent the time that is now spent to a great extent in the preparatory or secondary schools. Some of the most insistent complaints with regard to the defects of education at the present time have been heard exactly with regard to our secondary school education. Adolescents are not given that training for life nor have emphasized for them the principles of ethics which would make better men of them.Moral philosophy is a special subject of study that is very rarely met with in the curriculum of a preparatory school though this is the impressionable age when it would be best learned and when the application of its principles may be so deeply engraved as to become habitual. As a result of this defect in secondary school education there is no period in life when ethics as representing principles of personal conduct is taught.Gabriel Rise has been working at essay writing service for several years.You can ask her about customer service concerning the custom essay or dissertation that you have.
Keyword : education
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