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What are non-traditional views of formal schooling? “Drop the 'dropout': this country was built by people without formal credentials” by Charles Cooke

This article emphasizes the way American culture views higher education, especially college. Cooke claims , “any culture that fetishizes its system of formal education will soon end up disparaging those who drop out”. Drop out has become synonymous with all sorts of negative adjectives that are usually some variation of stupid and not good enough. But Cooke gives an entire paragraph filled with examples of extremely high profile successful people who no one would attribute the typical dropout traits to. On one hand, having the right credentials is important to achieving success. But on the other,  higher education has been continually yielding more questionable results.  Higher education in college has become “a rite of passage--"what one does" between high school and the real world” (Cooke 1). But before they make it to the real world, college is designed to evaluate everyone who walks through its doors. College weeds out the good and the bad, and develops social attitudes that are similar, as to leave the population easily manageable. Cooke quotes Ellwood Cubberly, a professor at Standford, bluntly saying schools are “factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life”. College can give a solid education, but along with that it causes conformity and submission to authority. Despite the negatives, college has become so traditional in society that the question of where did you go to school has become all important.

Cooke, Charles C.W. "Drop the 'dropout': this country was built by people without formal credentials." National Review 21 Apr. 2014: 19. Global Issues in Context. Web. 3 June 2014.

(I know the spacing needs to be double and the citation needs a hanging indent; I just can't figure out how to do it on here and it didn't transfer from Google docs.)