From Stuffed Sausage to Shiny Pearls The article “What True Education Should Do” written by Sydney Harris caught my attention the most out of all of the readings we were given. In his article, Sydney J. Harris, a writer for major Chicago newspapers, is defining what he thinks true education is. There are two different ways of being educated according to Harris. One of those is that students are stuffed with information and the other is eliciting information from inside of the students’ minds. He gives us a quite honest analogy to support his ideas. He states that students are like empty sausage casings and are being “stuffed” with information by our educators. Harris makes it clear that he does not agree with students being stuffed with information and believes that pupils have …show more content…
But I think in some classes, it has gotten worse. I think part of the problem might be teachers losing their passion for teaching. I may be wrong, but it seems that some teachers get the material they are supposed to teach, put it up on a PowerPoint for us to take notes, and then expect us to regurgitate it on a test. They do things like this instead of fun activities that really make us think and discover new things in our minds. Although this is just an assumption, this article really did make me think. I found that interesting because we are in the critical thinking unit and it is exactly what we are meant to do. We’re meant to think about things, analyze things, synthesize things, and then think about it all over again until we finally come to our own conclusion. I think that was the main point of Harris’s article. We discover our true feelings and knowledge when we search for them inside of our minds, and then we create something with our own unique ideas. Sydney J. Harris did a wonderful job on this article and I thoroughly enjoyed reading and then going into my own mind and writing about
In this time, most teachers’ brains have been numbed from all of the talk about the thinking process and abstract thinking skills (Ravitch). Students need a lot of knowledge to be able to think critically as they are expected to (Ravitch). We stand on the shoulders of those before us, we did not restart as each generation comes up in the world as we wish it would (Ravitch). What we need to be learning is how to use our brain’s capacity to make generalizations so we can see past our own experiences
A student and teacher should be able to openly communicate or discuss the content and/or topic in class. To begin the educating process, one must set the correct tone and setting for it. Education is supposed to be an “experience”. An experience is supposed to engage all that are involved in it. “That every reader, everyone engaged in any teaching or learning practice, explicitly wonders about his or her work as teacher or pupil, in mathematics, history, biology, or grammar classes, is of little importance. That as teacher or pupil in the experience of the critical instruction in content that all explicitly engage a “reading of the world” that would be of a political nature, is not of the highest necessity” (Freire 49). ...
Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are (Freier 216). It seems like these great authors such as Walker Percy and Paulo Freier criticize the role educators play in the education system and urge students to break free from the conformity of the way subjects are taught in school and truly experience them through our own dialectical approach.
“There is no doubt that education is important. There is also no doubt that every person has the right to an education” (Pharinet 680). Therefore, it makes it controversial that whether every American citizen should participate in tertiary education or not. One of the divergences in this controversy is that the vocational school is or is not accounted for tertiary education as college is. In On “Real Education”, the author, Robert T. Perry, claims that everyone should have experience of “postsecondary education”, no matter which kind of form it is (672). Since he defined the term “postsecondary education” clearly, he efficiently sells his ideas to most of audiences. However, he alienates the hostile and even neutral readers effectively because of the insufficiency of evidence or objectivity, the deficiency of credibility and the incompletion of logic.
...simply reuses the same approach and methodology each year, his class is likely to become boring and ineffective. In order to properly educate students, a teacher must always be looking for ways to improve his course—methods of making the knowledge seem more interesting and relevant to students. Originality and innovation not only maintain students’ attention, but also help keep teachers interested. Any subject matter will seem boring if an instructor teaches it the same way for twenty years. In order to maximize the effectiveness of their teaching, educators constantly must be in search of new methods of presenting content. Complacency, after all, is the first step on the road to ineffective instruction. Teachers, like their students, must always remain motivated by the desire to improve. Without this desire, the process of education becomes stagnant and empty.
Once this becomes the norm for teachers they tend to become uninteresting, and students are the ones reaping the consequences. Rose acknowledged this cycle of learning apathy, writing, “But mostly the teachers had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond”(1989, p.2).
Due to the effects of higher enrolment, teaching methods are now directed towards suiting the masses, thus everything has become less personal, as well as, less educationally in depth. Teaching techniques consist of multiple choice tests, rather than written answer questions which require critical analysis, as Jacobs states “So many papers to mark, relative to numbers and qualities of mentors to mark them, changed the nature of test papers. Some came to consist of “True or False?” and “Which of the following is correct?” types of questions” (Jacobs 49). While teachers also no longer engage in one on one conversations with students, but merely in a lecture hall among masses and everyone is seen as just a student number. Jacobs states a complaint from a student “who claimed they were shortchanged in education. They had expected more personal rapport with teachers” (Jacobs 47). Universities are too much focused on the cost benefit analysis, of the problem of increased enrolment, with the mind set of “quantity trumps quality” (Jacobs 49). The benefit of student education and learning is not being put first, but rather the expansion of the university to benefit financial issues. Taylor states “individualism and the expansion of instrumental reason, have often been accounted for as by-products
Step one is focusing more on students critically thinking or thinking on their own. A great phrase of putting this idea to the test is, “focusing more on the question than the answer.” (Schlesinger 34). In The Power of “Why?” Schlesinger expresses her feeling towards what the bigger impact can be on students when focusing more on the depth of the question than how “quickly” and “correctly” students answer the question (34). She mentions that teachers are evaluated on how students test scores are rather than how critically they think. Schlesinger says that educators can help students think critically by, “letting the students speak their minds”, or teaching students that answers to our history has/will change as well as previous information that we once obtained from the past (34). Oftentimes teachers are afraid to let students open their minds and really think about the question because they think the books answer is the only right one. Teachers also may be more focused on making sure that the students know the right answer so they can do well on future test that the administration uses to evaluate the teachers. Students can significantly gain and profit from this tiny step in our education system. El...
When we talk about education, we remember our teachers of elementary, middle and high school because they left their mark on our lives, and are who we truly taught things that even we , and we have to our knowledge, is that the main purpose of my philosophy educational. The basis of my educational philosophy pragmatism. The goal of education for pragmatists is the socialization of the individual and the transmission of cultural ideas of man to new generations. In this way, new generations have no need to repeat it step by step, the experiences of their ancestors (Riestra, 1970). The school must be active in developing critical thinking in the learner. This should not be a passive entity in the process of their education, you must learn to learn . The school must prepare students for this interaction with their environment that is always changing.
Russell(1932/2013:107-108) knew however that one of the difficulties in large educational facilities is that the administrators, the people in charge, are not generally teachers; so they do not have the knowledge of what is possible to be learnt and what is not during a time frame the teachers have to impart the knowledge they are expected to, thus they put too much into the curriculum, and the result is that nothing is learnt thoroughly. Russell stated that “the problem of over-education is both important and difficult” (Russell, 1932/2013:109). Important because over-education can lead to loss of self-confidence, spontaneity, and health which leads to them being a less useful member of society than he may have been; and difficult because as the amount of knowledge there is in the world grows, it becomes more difficult to know what is relevant. However; Russell(1932/2013:109) acknowledges that merely letting children not learn will not work as society depends on trained and well-informed intelligent
How do we get educated? To most, education is an arduous slog through school; starting with simple stories about naughty rabbits swapping bologna sandwiches. As we grow, we move on to more and more intellectual pursuits- onward to ancient kings being depressed. By the time we graduate we are ready for a life as a ‘productive member of society’. One may find themselves wondering where that shift is from ignorant to educated. Most people will tell you it comes when you graduate high school, some will argue that it will not happen until you become a parent, others will say it never happens. David Foster Wallace and Mike Rose believe that being educated is not a matter of how well you have been educated, but how you grow as a person. Mike Rose’s life experiences illustrate this perfectly.
Ever since I was young, I have wanted to become a teacher. Throughout my education I’ve had some outstanding teachers who have inspired me to one day become a teacher. Teaching is not just a job. Teachers mold their students into independent and self-sufficient members of society. Teachers give their students’ knowledge to succeed in everyday life. I believe that teachers should play multiple roles, not just one. Teachers should be the motivator, the facilitator, the challenger, and the supporter in their students’ lives. Without teachers or some form of education, ignorance would reign the world. Each teacher has their own personal views on teaching, how students learn, classroom goals, and professional development. When thinking about my future as a teacher there are many questions that come to mind. How do I plan to teach when I have my first classroom? What content or topics will I focus on? What teaching strategies will I use to help my students learn? How will I relate to my students? Many teachers have educational philosophies that guide them in the classroom. Philosophy is a set of principles we choose to live by, even though we often consciously think about them. A philosophy is a statement about the beliefs and ideals that underlie your thinking. After taking many surveys over educational philosophies to see what my philosophy would be, the results showed that many of the philosophies listed best fit my thinking about education. When considering what my educational philosophy would be, I done a little research and choose progressivism.
In most classes that I 've been in, the class sizes were between twenty five to thirty students, so the teacher or professor would always hurry to teach us and provide us all with information, without making sure that we all understood the lesson that was given. They failed to realize, that we were not critically thinking about the lesson. Sadly, I too can say that I have been so accustomed to this concept of learning, that throughout my schooling, I was never actually challenged to think critically, I would usually guess what I thought would be the right answer to an equation or an assignment, and instead of actually thinking about what the answer is or why it should be correct, I would depend on my memory rather than reason. The traditional way of education has been force feeding us students with information. Although the teachers cannot wait for students to engage in critical thinking, they should still inspire us to become partners to build a teacher-student relationship, instead of only giving us assignments without explaining why they are necessary or how they can benefit us in the real
The two philosophies that I have chosen to write about for my Education Philosophy Paper includes progressivism and existentialism. Progressivism focuses on the child rather than the subject matter. Due to society always changing, new ideas are important to make the future better than the past for students learning. This educational philosophy stresses that students should test ideas by active experimentation. Learning is rooted in the questions of learners that arise through experiencing the world. Progressivists believe that individuality, progress, and change are fundamental to one 's education. Existentialism is a highly subjective philosophy that stresses the importance of the individual and emotional commitment to living authentically. It emphasizes individual choice over
In this course I experienced an important change in my beliefs about teaching; I came to understand that there are many different theories and methods that can be tailored to suit the teacher and the needs of the student. The readings, especially those from Lyons, G., Ford, M., & Arthur-Kelly, M. (2011), Groundwater-Smith, S., Ewing, R., & Le Cornu, R. (2007), and Whitton, D., Barker, K., Nosworthy, M., Sinclair, C., Nanlohy, P. (2010), have helped me to understand this in particular. In composing my essay about teaching methods and other themes, my learning was solidified, my knowledge deepened by my research and my writing skills honed.