What is Academia: Beyond the Classroom and into Life's Diverse Experiences
What Is Academia?
What is academia? How is it constructed? And what does the future of academia look like in the digital age? Academia, a community dedicated to education, research, and academic priorities, is not immune to the influence of technology. The future of academia is a question that's gaining more significance in a rapidly embracing digital transformation.
Think about our financial system and how the rise of digital currency has affected the perspective of money. Where do children learn a small portion about money? School in elementary mathematics. That is just about it, and they only know to count. Pass that children only remember a little about finances if they attend a university and pursue a degree within the financial sector. Why am I stating this? Because what children need to know is not taught in school, and what they do not need is taught? Yes. It’s baffling because it impedes students in many processes in an ever-changing world.
The History of Academia
The history of academia starts with Plato’s?Academy,?which originated approximately 390 to 380 B.C.E and was an educational institution where Plato taught his philosophies. These scholars, intellectuals, and skeptics would attend the Academy to explore the ideas of nature through teaching, conversation, and research. Plato’s perspective on school or education was that man learned through observation and repetition but also through the ideas of others. Plato’s education ideology also intersects with philosophy, religion, and ethics. During these sessions, Plato would have numerous seminars, field questions of his study, and seminars over the concluded research. As Plato’s Academy began to evolve with the world, many other academies were created by philosophers, intellects, and skeptics of the same fundamental constructs with different practices. These essential practices have evolved into modern educational institutions and modern educational techniques.
Socialization
Socialization is pivotal throughout societal, business organizations, and institutions. As society changes, we must also adapt to the times of change. Depending on the direction of the world, academia, art, business, and politics shift to the times. The future of our world lies within the innovation, optimization, and creation of technology. Aside from technology, media content is an emerging approach to expressing, entertaining, and educating ourselves. We are moving into a more immersive futuristic approach to living, as are our societal norms.
These changes in how we interact with individuals and objects are also crucial because our nature is what will shape our perspective, thoughts, and actions. Nature is in how we communicate language and ideas. Today, everything is done through media, film, videos, graphics, and short-form literary content. Individuals, primarily students, are engaged more when learning becomes immersive and social, allowing students creative freedom. With the approach to having students be creative and open-minded and learn through experimentative creation, academia helps students learn within a school and how to approach life with logic and reasoning. Furthermore, children will learn habits and virtues such as patience, critical thinking, principles, ethics, and morals. All of which should be applied to every interaction students experience.
Issues within academia in brief
Another example would be funding educational institutions for students, sports, and academic programs. The cost of everything going on, including pandemics, wars, and political unrest, can immensely affect these educational institutions.
In the context of mixed funding, it makes sense to ask whether certain academic institutions also support private interests. Moreover, publicly funded educational institutions might still have interests on their own, such as building a reputation, being competitive, and financially profiting from that. From the perspective of individual researchers, the highly competitive nature of research in academia is fruitful ground for academic misconduct (e.g.,?Cartwright and Menezes, 2014 )
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Many educational institutions have a?code of order?or a plan that sometimes isn’t aligned with students or education but with money, power, and exploitation. The purpose of education or academia is to enlighten the students’ lives for the future, not for personal gain or profit that matters. This affects not only students but also teachers, professors, and those working among the students of an educational institution.
“To understand what motivates researchers to move from academia to industry, one must compare working conditions for highly educated workers such as life scientists. A recent survey with more than 3,000 researchers as participants revealed a much higher satisfaction of scientists working in industry than in academia (Woolston, 2021 ). Researchers from industry feel more optimistic about their careers.”
As for professors, teachers, and teaching assistants, many careers within academia are not well-suited for the position, roles of the work, and internal and external problems educators experience during their academic years. With the lack of funding, inflation, and political wars, academia has short-handed students and educators. In addition, when working in academia, many educators are on fixed-term contracts, whereas scholars in the industry have permanent positions with reasonable pay. Not receiving compensation or practical benefits causes many educators to seek jobs or careers in sectors instead of educational institutions, leading to teacher shortages, strikes, and political controversy.
Most prospective college students need more money to afford college, even at its lowest expense. Many children have scholarly talent but need more funds to commit to pursuing higher education. Aside from students, funding academic research and programs has sometimes become scarce or short-handed because of the ROI or process of getting funded. These institutions are prominent in roles that society needs, but there are many issues within the system of academia. Many political and ethical issues in academia, such as racial inequality, financial inequality, stereotypes, gender inequality, and the costs of a degree, are some of the numerous problems within academia.
Academia is more than just formal education.
Academia is not necessarily school but education as a whole. Education is life. Academia goes far beyond the classroom. Academia is anything where formal education can be applied and used to creatively, critically, and experimentally assess a problem, approach, and find a simplified solution through style and technique. For example, this literary piece itself is nothing more than?applied academia.?That is what I termed it for myself in my journey through writing. Though I am crafting this art form myself, I still use what I learned through my academic career to help better my literary skills. I feel the future of academia should be applied through a child’s interest instead of set curricula. The time we are experiencing has shown that millions of people are learning through media and content.
School is fine, but the structure could be much better, the environment could have much more freedom, and helping to find scholarly and personal talent could spark a universal dynamic world. In a short example, like-minded interests could lead kids to hang with peers with the same interests, ambitions, and goals. The motivation, social energy, and learning progression will be faster, with them being a group of those interested. Education could also complement this structure and setting with project-based assignments and projects. Not the boring one standing in front of a class but one that requires them to create something innovative for the world.
Conclusion
If academia is at the forefront of education to make education worth the start of children’s future, why not make school feel like the real world? A place where children are taught to know the information and create information to optimize the changing time to adapt for the future of its progression. Academia is an art that requires comprehension, observation, experimentation, and experimentation through repetition.
Works Cited