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Crisis in Higher Education
Argument: There is a crisis in higher education. Most students finish college without increasing their ability to engage in “complex reasoning, critical thinking, and written communication.” That means that someone with a bachelor’s degree is not likely to be better at those skills than they were when they had just a high school diploma. High school students have lower standardized test scores than ever before. They arrive in college with fewer skills than at any time in the last 60 years. Still, people with college degrees earn much more than people without them. Thus, a college degree is not about education but about buying a chance to earn more money.
Introduction
This paper presents the premises and conclusion of the argument presented above. It further presents Kant’s thoughts about whether the argument demonstrates the existence of a moral problem in the institutes of higher education. Notably, Kant would think that the argument demonstrates that there is a moral problem in higher education. According to the shared argument, the primary goal of education is economic prosperity, where an individual can secure a chance to earn more money. This contradicts Kantian philosophy, which posits that education is a process in which a person must transform undesirable characteristics into ethically acceptable ones in society. Kant’s argument would be sound since the crisis in higher education is based on facts.
Premises and Conclusion in the Argument
The shared argument has three premises. The first premise is that most students finish college without increasing their ability to engage in complex reasoning, critical thinking, and written communication. The second premise is that high school graduates arrive in college with fewer skills than at any time in the last 60 years. The third premise is that a college degree is not about education but rather buying a chance to earn more money. The conclusion of the shared argument is that there is a crisis in higher education. The fact that most students finish college without increasing their ability to engage in complex reasoning, critical thinking, and communication skills, high school graduates arrive in college with fewer skills than at any time in the past years, and a college degree is not about education but rather buying a chance to earn more money demonstrates the increasing crisis in higher education.
Whether Kant Would Demonstrate that there is a More Problem in Higher Education
Based on the argument shared above, Kant would think that there is a moral problem in higher education. This is because, according to the shared argument, the primary goal of education is economic prosperity, where an individual can secure a chance to earn more money. This contradicts Kantian philosophy, which posits that education is a process where an individual must shade the unwanted characters to the morally acceptable ones by society. In this case, it can be argued that education is more than securing economic prosperity.
According to Kantian Philosophy, education aims to inculcate values and principles for man’s survival irrespective of selfish approaches. Human and education are interrelated terms that have exhibited generational improvements. The improvement gets based on inculcating ethical values and principles, which are the products of the schooling system (DiCenso 38). As such, the schooling system should create an environment where an individual that has passed through it can ethically strategize his moves. Faure of an individual to employ the expected values and principles as expected by the society leads to the detriment of savagery. The detriment gets based on the inability of an individual school graduate to employ critical thinking and complex reasoning to solve the challenges in the society but only mind about economic benefits. Therefore education that focuses on the self-material gain is immoral, according to Kant’s philosophy.
Kant also depicts that education crates the ability of an individual to judge right from wrong. An educated individual is different from an uneducated person. The two should posit two antagonistic conceptualizations of the world (Bayrak 2715). However, the current situation seems the opposite since many graduates lack the thinking capacity required for strategic communication and critical analysis of any framework that may exist in the reasoning process.
The theory about the child not performing a task per the wish and favour justifies Kant’s reasoning about education and morality. Children become familiar with the task through the rising principle of practical wisdom, which gets generated through a step-by-step mechanism (Bayrak 2714). Practical wisdom enables the child to apply what has been learnt to what is required in real life. Failing to apply the taught and learnt approaches disputes the training pedagogy. The practical wisdom analysis relates to the degree graduates who cannot apply the taught concept of practical reasoning, written communication and critical thinking to justify the morality behind education. The only concept that the university graduates posit is based on needing more money compared to a fellow who has not graduated. As such, the contemporary education system gets natured at the money-making process by the students instead of using the practical wisdom as per Kant’s argument to benefit the society.
Through education, humans can rule nature by applying critical thinking, practical reasoning and imagination. Lacking the principle of imagination and practical thinking renders education valueless (Kuntjoro 230). In contrast with the contemporary situation, many people advance their education level to attain degrees or for the sake of money without considering the ability to acquire new skills to act differently compared with those that have not graduated. As such, the current education fails to provide practical reasoning to students, especially the high school diploma graduates who lack the practical reasoning and imagination skills to handle the concepts in collages. Therefore education is rendered a money-centered approach rather than the attainment of critical reasoning and complex imagination.
Kant depicts that intuition without the concept is blind. The lack of the elements that generate knowledge makes the same impossible. The elements play the role of sensibility with the power to conceive and understand characterized by the power to think. Failure of an individual to apply the coercive power and the thinking power renders the process of knowledge acquisition valueless. According to Kant, education with value makes a noon-reasoning man become a critical thinker who can quickly solve life challenges. The inability of an individual to apply the knowledge taught creates a dilemma in the institution that offers the knowledge. Therefore, education is considered the concept through which human acquires knowledge to become helpful in society (Ward 203). However, contemporary education has characterized the graduated individual with the inability to apply critical thinking and complex reasoning, placing the institution in limbo. The confirmation of the questionable education system gets traced from the graduated diploma secondary students who join the higher learning institutions without a clue to adapt to the required knowledge-based context. As a result, the Kantian argument on the knowledge without the content being empty justifies that the education system in contemporary society is all about money as opposed to the engagement of learners in critical reasoning and complex thinking.
An individual needs education to develop gradually from stage to stage. The gradual development entails the ability of an individual to think critically, apply the written communication pedagogy and implement the power of complex reasoning to mitigate any possibility of the arising life challenges like in the employment sector (Bayrak 714). Also, Kant views a person as an existence that needs education to create a dimension of differentiating the one that has acquired education from the one that has not. Consequently, through increased productivity, education separates a man from an animate and lifeless existence. Even though a degree graduate has received education from higher learning institutions, an individual cannot critically solve the problems that arise in employment. The inability of a degree graduate to survive favorably confirms the rottenness in education that favors the graduates based on money. As a result, failure for the gradual development of an individual, as confirmed by the lack of improvement from the high school capability to the college capability, depicts that education is all about money.
Education enables an individual to get committed to moral laws. His moral laws include the ability of a graduate to think critically and apply complex reasoning for sustainable survival. Moral laws also define the discipline nature of an individual to reason as per society’s expectations. As such, Kant defends the need for an individual to be critically disciplined and handle tasks appropriately (DiCenso 40). Contrary to Kant’s argument, the contemporary institution produces graduates who cannot apply the taught written communication, thereby confirming the immorality that has taken shape in higher learning institutions. The immorality confirms that an individual goes to school and graduates for the sake of money through bribery in order to get paid higher salaries.
According to Immanuel Kant, all knowledge begins with senses, proceeds to understand and ends with reasoning. The higher perspective of knowledge is reasoning. Failure to reason disputes the moral principle of knowledge (Ward 243). However, many graduates who are assumed to have acquired knowledge fail to apply what has been taught to understand life concepts and reason favorably due to the rush of economic self-gain. Education without understanding and reasoning renders the system valueless and survives based on money.
Conclusion
Overall, there is evidence to support the rising crisis in higher education whereby education has become the tool through which an individual completes and graduates for the sake of money. Due to the money-centered approaches, the high school diploma graduates cannot quickly adapt to college life due to limited critical thinking and reasoning. Also, college graduates lack complex reasoning that can enable them to survive favorably in the employment environment. Written communication skills are still a problem for college graduates. Therefore, education fails to inculcate ethics and moral values as expected in society but majors in money-making frameworks.
Works Cited
Bayrak, Y. Kant’s View on Education. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, 2713-2715. 2015. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042815010150
DiCenso, James J. “Kant on ethical institutions.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 57.1 (2019): 30-55.. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/sjp.12314
Kuntjoro, Antonius Puspo. “Moral Education as a Method in the Immanuel Kant Ethics Project.” Respons-Jurnal Etika Sosial 21.02 (2019): 225-250.https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3628255
Ward, Keith. The development of Kant’s view of ethics. John Wiley & Sons, 2019.https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=vh-WDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=KANT+IDEA+ON+MORAL+DEVELOPMENT&ots=WCKSqW8UxP&sig=_aTg8s2-xcBIeS5UGrcJF72sSTk
