18 pages • 36 minutes read
Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education
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Literary Devices
Analogy
An analogy compares two similar things to explain a concept. In the essay, Sanders uses the analogy of a fitness studio in comparison to a college education. One pays for a membership to train at the gym. This gives the person access to the building, the equipment, oftentimes a personal trainer, and any other amenities. However, by signing up for a membership to a gym or health club, it by no means guarantees the member will get in shape. College operates similarly; a student doesn’t for an education because education cannot be purchased any easier than a fit body can. Instead, one is paying for access to professors, the library, services, etc. The education is up to the individual student or learner to achieve.
Anecdotes
An anecdote is a short story often used to support an author’s point. Sanders provides several anecdotes from employers who prefer to hire college graduates with degrees in areas that appear to be counterintuitive for that specific job. For example, on Page 1 of the essay, there’s an anecdote about a recruiter for the computer science field. The recruiter admits to preferring to hire honors history majors rather than computer science majors simply because it is more important in this recruiter's eyes that a new hire be someone who can think critically than that they come in with a specific set of job-related skills. The employee can learn skills on the job, but critical thinking and creativity are far more difficult to develop. The author uses these types of anecdotes to highlight the argument that college is less about learning job-specific skills and more about becoming someone who can think critically, create, and learn.
Repetition
Repetition in literature is when an author repeats a word or phrase to emphasize a concept’s importance. Matthew Sanders reverts to repetitive statements and terms throughout the essay. The terms learner, student, critical thinking, and others come up repeatedly in the essay. Sanders also repeats the idea that education is not about grades or acquiring job-specific skills. Ideas and terms are repeated in the essay to highlight their importance and reinforce these concepts in the reader's mind. The essay works on many levels like that of a mantra, something repeated over and over until it replaces another thought, which thought in turn (hopefully) affects a change of behavior, and since this is the goal of the essay, to change one's approach and perspective on college education, the use of repetition is apropos.
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