Rhetorical Analysis Essay On Education

For many US school students, it is not uncommon to hear that their schooling system is an inefficient and terrible one. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Education,” he addresses many of the problems with the schooling system in the United States in his time; problems that still plague the country over 150 years later.
One issue that Emerson focuses on is that of mass education and its inefficacy. Emerson writes that “our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one . . .” Here, he criticizes the apparent lack of effort that is put into such a sacred endeavor as the education of a child. Every child is different, and as such must be educated individually.
With free, mandatory public education in many—if not most—developed countries, mass education can be found almost everywhere around the world. This mass education of all children does have its benefits, as an educated populace is inarguably a positive thing. Also, as Emerson writes, “the advantages of this system of emulation and display are so prompt and obvious, it is such a time-saver, it is so energetic on slow and on bad natures, and is of so easy application, needing no sage or poet, but any tutor or schoolmaster in his first term can apply it.” Despite these advantages of the mass schooling system, its downfalls are all too apparent. Every possible student is very different from the next and therefore each has different methods for learning different subjects. Yet, in its current form, public education forces students to take certain classes that they may not want to take and, even worse, uses the same approach to teaching every student. This inevitably leads to some students being ignored when they do not understand what they should for an upcoming test—a test that evaluates all students the same way. Emerson even warns about the danger of large schools in his essay; he writes, “[the task of educating] facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the
Although, as Emerson says, everyone has an innate desire to learn, when children are made to be educated, there will, inevitably, be some that do not want to be educated, if only in certain subjects that they are required to study. This unwillingness of students to learn only makes the job harder on the teacher, who is already in a situation where they cannot easily speak to their students of their passion simply because they are made to not educate each student individually. Emerson writes in his essay of how mass education takes the “human aspect” out of teaching in that it “is so easy that it does not need a man to apply it; an automaton, a machine, can be made to keep a school