The quality of our education system has only declined the past few decades, despite increased federal involvement and regulations. Now the federal government says the answer is to get involved more and make more regulations.

Currently there’s a growing national furor about the Common Core State Standards Initiative, also known simply as Common Core. This federal initiative will have every school district in the nation follow the same standards, undermining educational quality and choice.

Initiatives like common core don’t make students smarter. They force every student to learn the same government-prescribed subjects with government-prescribed materials in order to pass government tests and meet government standards.

This mundane, cookie-cutter approach to “education” stifles creativity and critical thinking, and smothers a child’s natural thirst for knowledge. It doesn’t create independent thinkers; it creates workers who don’t question what they are told and are obedient to the state. Perhaps that’s exactly what they’re meant to do.

To keep people in this system, the federal government gives out student loans to anyone who wants them. The Detroit Free Press reported last week that more than 40 percent of undergrads have taken out federal student loans this year, producing a $41.3 billion profit for the federal government.

Of course this system is also a giant cash cow for universities, with student loans allowing them to raise tuition prices at a rate two or three times the rate of inflation.

This summer, President Obama signed a measure that would slightly lower the interest rates on federal student loans. However, this does not change the fact that with inexcusably high tuition prices and their exponential increases, interest rates are essentially irrelevant.

You may say it is good to indiscriminately give out loans in such a manner because it allows more people to get college degrees. In reality, what it has done is burden an entire generation in debt. Americans currently owe more in student loans than they do in credit cards or mortgages.

The federal loan system has also transformed universities into a place where young people go to simply conform and achieve a sense of legitimacy, rather than a place to attend out of a genuine interest in higher learning.

In an educational system with the government at the helm, it is not much of an educational system at all. Rather, it is a propaganda-driven, profit-oriented, Stockholm syndrome-inducing system of state indoctrination.

At the core of almost all of the nation’s problems is a populace that is unquestioning of authority, unaware of what is going on in their government and quite frankly, lacking in critical thinking skills.

If someone is to tackle this nation’s many problems at the source, then changing the manner in which young Americans are educated, or conditioned to think, is certainly a good place to start.

Nick Smith is a senior broadcast and digital journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter at @Nick_X_Smith.

Published on December 2, 2013 at 1:50 am