Is Education Enough for the Real World? Essay -- Womens Education Argu

Is Education Enough for the Real World? Is a college education enough to prepare and teach you about life? A college education is important to prepare you for a career in a specialized field, but it cannot prepare you for the real world. Through my experience as a 23 year-old woman, I can say that I have learned more outside of school to prepare me for my future life. I have had to learn more through outside resources, family, friends, and love-interest relationships to be able to survive as a strong-minded female in today's society. As I read articles on education I was able to find two authors that shared my views about education in today's society: Adrienne Rich and Jon Spayde. In the article "What Does a Woman Need to Know?" by Adrienne Rich, Rich delivers a commencement address to female college graduates about the condition of women's education. As a writer and teacher, Rich states that "there is no women's college today which is providing young women with the education they need for survival as whole persons in a wo rld which denies women wholenesss" (qtd. in Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz 66). According to interviewer and editor Jon Spayde in the article "Learning in the Key of Life," Spayde's essay reflects that education should take place throughout a lifetime and not just through formal schooling. Both Rich and Spayde believe that education should be taken to a farther extent than just what we learn in school. Through history and culture every human being, especially women, can learn a lot about themselves and become strong-minded individuals. Adrienne Rich argues that women have been viewed as existing in the service of men, and it is only through knowledge that we can learn to overcome such a view. Rich believes tha... ...w much I have learned on my own and I am thankful for the resources and the people around me that have helped me become a self-defining human being. My own experiences have taught me to survive in the real world more than my college education. If we are just educated through college, we will not be prepared for problems that the real world confronts us with until we learn from our own experiences. Once we become street-educated we can come to survive real life experiences and learn how to deal with them. The best education can come from what we learn in our own experiences to help teach us valuable lessons about life. Through culture and humanities we can learn about others and ourselves, in order to be able to adapt to our own environment. To become successful in life, we must teach ourselves what we really want to know and obtain the answers we want in our lives.