Thursday, March 15, 2018
Education and You!
Minority education is something we have been discussing in regards to Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers". Compare this discussion of minority education with Alexie's discussion of the same topic in "Superman and Me". Both pieces touch on similar themes, and comparing the two essays should lead to complex thinking about the purpose and value of education in America. So, first write about how the two essays are similar and why, and then, write a paragraph about the purpose and value of education in America, according to YOU!
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The essays “Superman and Me” and “A Talk to Teachers” share the same discussion that evaluates how the world disorderly treats the education of minorities. In “A Talk to Teachers”, the main evaluation is that the minority of African Americans in a school are treated unfairly. They are treated to the point where even their own parents encourage them not to speak out for what they believe because it could potentially lead them into trouble. Many separate education due to the way people look or their background. This relates the two essays above. “Superman in Me” is about an Indian man who tells of his past experiences in school. Many other Indian kids, like him, were discouraged to learn and told they are just “stupid.” He recognized that this is not the way it is meant to be and strived to succeed. These two essays derive to establish the same meaning for education. Education is not if you know more than the person next to you, it’s the opposite. You should want the person next to you to be educated. The only competition is with yourself, education is a common goal to grow the intellectual interest within people. Education calls everyone to learn not certain groups of people.
ReplyDeleteThe purpose and value of education in America is to enlighten the brain with knowledge. By being educated American citizens can provide for themselves and make living easier for the people around them. Engineers, teachers, bankers, etc. are all examples of educated fields that make the average person’s life easier. Engineers create new technologies to help everyday life, teachers educate citizens even more, and people like bankers allow caring for our own money even easier. Education is something that someone should earn but nothing should be able to stop them from earning it except themselves. No one has the right to prevent someone from learning even if they are from a different country or a minority
I like that you bring in examples of major jobs in America today. It helps to put things into perspective.
DeleteEducation has grown and developed over long years within our country’s history. Alexia and Baldwin discussed education within their writing that can give us a lens into how education was in a time we can’t be in. The problem with our education wasn’t exactly that it was bad, the problem was racism and segregation. In “Superman and Me,” Alexie talks about how his life as an Indian student. He was always thought of as dumber, but tried to push through to prove everyone wrong. He was allowed to be educated, but was looked down upon. In “A Talk to Teachers,” Baldwin discusses the prejudice against his black community in America’s education system at that time. He talks about how black children stand at the flag and talk about having liberty and justice, but aren’t allowed to have an equal education to other children. While discussing different issues, both of these men wrote works that created a different perspective on how we were treating our educational system. We wanted to educate kids, but we also just wanted to educate the kids we felt deserved it. Our America put the most effort into the kids that we saw the most potential in. At this time, our education wanted to give those we thought had academic the biggest chance. This mindset wasn’t right, but neither were any of our attitudes about people who were different from us. This was America’s view on education back then, that those who showed potential and fit the standard deserved the most educational effort.
ReplyDeleteMy education today is very different from what their education was then. In some ways it’s good, and in other ways it isn’t as I would like it to be. As a junior in a catholic school, I wish that my faith was being furthered by this education. There were many points in my life that I felt could have been bettered by lessons I could have learned in my catholic education but didn’t. Ok a more positive note, I like that I feel comfortable with many of my teachers. While listening to some of them make me mad, I could talk to other for hours and hours about anything. This makes learning from them so much easier. While my education isn’t perfect, it is far better than was Alexie and Baldwin experienced, and for that I’m grateful.
Injustice is more than a word. It is experience, and it is conversation. It is ignorance, and it is aggression. It is debated, and it is debated, and it is debated. Debate leads to prominence, putting possibly heated, uncomfortable, and disagreeable conversations at the forefront. Prominence, however, does not necessarily ensure exposure or change. That is the topic most obvious when analyzing the intersection of such important pieces as Sherman Alexie’s “Superman and Me” and James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” also known as “The Negro Child—His Self-Image”. Both pieces explore the complex themes of education and its purpose, society and its relationship to education, identity as it is referential of society, and systematic failure to provide given a collective identity. Both essays make significant points about injustice in education and society. In “Superman and Me”, Alexie takes a bit of a romantic approach to the purpose of education. He sees it as a means to grow and develop intellectually as well as personally/socially. Baldwin, however, believes education to have a different purpose. He sees education as paradoxically bound to society. He believes education serves to simultaneously (1) enforce concepts inherent or subliminal in a society and (2) liberate individuals from the indoctrination of their society. Both Alexie and Baldwin understand that education in America is meant to help individuals realize their potential and rise above their situations. They also recognize that their identities have also put them at a disadvantage in that respect. It is a paradox in its own right not dissimilar to the one presented by Baldwin himself. That being said, I do believe that the words of each man speak for themselves. The writings of both Baldwin and Alexie are borne of experience and analysis. Despite these pieces having been written three to four decades apart on matters of injustice that would seem to lack pertinence to the other, they do share common themes.
ReplyDeleteIt really helped that you put ones and twos in your writing. It helped to see your points.
DeleteTo preface, I have read a few of the blogs before posting myself, and I honestly found something both disturbing and disheartening in the content of the posts. It seems that there is a bit of a disconnect from the realities of poverty among my classmates, one that is understandable given the privileges we have been granted as a part of this local and educational community. I must be frank, however, when I say that it seems that many of us have a tendency to blame the impoverished for poverty. I understand that many of us, having gone to Catholic school for most of our lives, may not understand public education, so I will take this opportunity to give a bit of a hypothetical explanation. School districts require tax payer dollars for funding. When a poor family lives in a poor school district, their children must go to a school with the funding provided by the liminal taxes of the residents of that district. Those children go to a school without the funding or resources to give them a proper education, and as such, test scores will, in general, fall below the national average. In some cases, those students will go on to college and amass a debt they cannot repay, in other cases they will not be able to continue with higher education (be it because of the cost, test score requirements, etc.). If they cannot continue with their education, they will more likely than not remain where they were raised. They will work at a minimum wage job. They will live where they can afford. They will do what they have to to survive and support themselves and any dependents. The cycle continues. Now obviously, this is an over simplification, but it serves to enforce a point—you cannot blame someone for failure when the system works in such a way that they are to fail. No amount of American “rugged individualism” can account for all of those lost to poverty. I must say, I agree with Baldwin in many of his views on education. It is supportive and deconstructive. It would be a farce to say we have all been given the same opportunities regarding education. Yes, we are all made equal, but keep in mind, equality is not equity.
ReplyDeleteWhat you propose is itself "disturbing and disheartening" and in, fact, evil. It sounds compassionate, but truly only promotes an endless string of poverty. Let me explain. At birth, some people are at a better footing than others, the rich and the poor. However, neither of them have the inherent ability to make more money, this skill must be developed. What happens is if the poor are able to recognize the value of knowlege and hard work, they will make their best efforts to find opportunity and make money. If the rich do not acquire this insight, the opposite will occur. Poverty is a state of mind. Why, then, generally, do the poor remain poor and the rich remain rich? Government. What the current system of education does is remove the incentive to improve oneself, shelters inefficiency and incompetence, and creates an environment so destructive that students are actually forced into attendence, regardless of how much funding these institutions receive that, mind you, are funded by the poor and rich alike. The poor must be free from government, and the only way to exit poverty is through empowering the individual with the freedom of opportinuty, FREEDOM AND LIBERTY. The government actually, in rectifying the apparent inequalities of society, impedes the ability of the individual to acquire the means to be successful and to find greater opportinuty. The current system of education is in complete opposition to freedom, and prevents students from earning the means to pay for education. Public education needs scrapped, or changed dramatically, so much change is needed. Private education really is no different in my experience, something needs to be done and done fast that's all I know.
DeleteIt is difficult to set aside prejudices for the sake of empowering all humanity with knowledge. This prejudice has manifest istself into the education system, but has slowly been displaced with ideals of equality. However, is equality truly what must be secured? What must be secured are not a meaningless set of problems to complete, nor essays to write, but the separate and equal station to pursue one's own purpose, to formulate one's own opinion and truly engage in meaningful debate with one another. This cannot be provided by impersonal beurocracy, but instead by the individual. This is the where conventional means of education, the education that is indoctrinated into us at birth, faults. The primary function of the current system of education is to assess the caliber of each individual by the completion of meaningless tasks that augment into a percentage or letter grade. Where the end-all goal is to achieve 100%, perfection, to be an "ideal" student. No student deserves an "A," nor does any student deserve an "F," but every student deserves a good education. The current system of education is based upon the notion that utopia is possible and, in fact, achievable if only students sacrfice their own individual freedom and liberty for the collective "equality" idealized by a handful of elites. From federal to state, from state to district, from district to school, from school to teacher, from teacher to student and from student to self, self must be placed above all, for that is the very purpose of education.
ReplyDelete"A Talk to Teachers" and "Superman and Me" both essentially address inequality in education in America, and also address how societal bias influences the inequality found in education. Obviously the people who make the policy regarding education are going to have their prejudices, even to a very small extent, imbued in the legislation. As society changes, so do the people making the legislation. These concerns are almost completely negligible now, however. If anything, these concerns, once thought to be a progressive pursuit, are becoming regressive and extreme. This can be elaborated on but im done.