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Individualism vs collectivism
Differences between individualism and collectivism
Individualism vs collectivism
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Individuals, specifically students, of todays modern world, often get caught up in the world of connections and seem to care less about receiving a quality education. This alters the way teachers teach and the way students learn. Students have become “consumers” as if education is an exchange for credits. In Walker Percy’s essay, "The Loss of the Creature”, he discusses how through preconceptions and the surrender of our sovereignty, humans lose the ability to experience life, education, and all their elements. Percy begins his essay with an example of the visitor who always wanted to visit Grand Canyon and his experience by the ideas and thoughts of what it should be when he was there. The second part of his essay he discusses the differences …show more content…
The person going to veterinary school would most likely be taking a biology and biology lab course. In the class, the students would be told exactly what to dissect without any room for exploration and curiosity. On the other hand, the Hunter/ fisherman has a true passion for it and can be as curios as they want. They will most likely remember more of the anatomy than the veterinary students do. The necessity of unmediated seeing and thinking in academia is very important. In order for students to really learn, they must truly get the full experience. Students can reclaim their rights as a sovereign individuals by simply being control of themselves and their education by allowing themselves to truly discover and understand each new topic they learn about. Students need to be liberated in their education and should be allowed to explore it for themselves instead of following a specific procedure. The students should be allowed and possibly even encouraged to make mistakes, because it may lead to a discovery and possible even new knowledge. For a student living in a developed culture, most education has become a prepackaged experience. We have expectations for the classroom and our teachers as well as for what being educated will do for our lives. An educators job is to help students break free from the experience and should encourage the students to think and experience education for
Congratulations on being admitted to State College! I am glad that you have made your decision to come here. State College has numerous great opportunities to offer its students. You also told me that you are enrolled in English Composition 101. One of the pieces of literature you will encounter in this class will be "The Loss of the Creature", by Walker Percy. For your preparation to the class I can summarize and give you my explanation of "The Loss of the Creature". Throughout the essay Percy tries to get across how any person with expectations or "packages" will not be able to fully accept and learn from any experience.
Our awareness, our perception within nature, as Thomas states, is the contrast that segregates us from our symbols. It is the quality that separates us from our reflections, from the values and expectations that society has oppressed against itself. However, our illusions and hallucinations of nature are merely artifacts of our anthropocentric idealism. Thomas, in “Natural Man,” criticizes society for its flawed value-thinking, advocating how it “[is merely] a part of a system . . . [and] we are, in this view, neither owners nor operators; at best, [are] motile tissues specialized for receiving information” (56). We “spread like a new growth . . . touching and affecting every other kind of life, incorporating ourselves,” destroying the nature we coexist with, “[eutrophizing] the earth” (57). However, Thomas questions if “we are the invaded ones, the subjugated, [the] used?” (57). Due to our anthropocentric idealism, our illusions and hallucinations of nature, we forget that we, as organisms, are microscopically inexistent. To Thomas, “we are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts,” but rather “we are shared, rented, occupied [as] the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria” (1).
To Thoreau, life’s progress has halted. It seems people have confused progression with captivity driven by materialism. To Krakaeur, people are indifferent to pursing the sublime in nature. To Christopher McCandles the world around him is forgetting the purpose of life. People are blind to nature. In the eyes of these men the world is victim to commercial imprisonment. People live to achieve statuses that only exist because man made them. Fame, money, and monotonous relationships do not exist in nature; they are the pursuits of soulless fundamentalism. The truth is that people pursue meaningless goals, and people don’t want to hear or know how they are foolish. When exposed, reality is so unsettling that it seems wrong. Yet, to be free of the falseness in life is in essence the point of singularity that people realize if there is no truth in love then it is false, if there is no truth in money then it is worthless, if there is no truth in fame then it is undeserving. Without truth everything is a worthless pursuit of a meaningless glass ceiling.
Ted Kooser’s poem “Student” underlines how the life of a student truly is. As we were discussing our insights of the poem “Student” by Ted Kooser, Omar Mejia mentioned how he found a comparison with a turtle in the poem. I have imagined a baby turtle and their journey when is born and running trying to reach the sea. Imagine the life of a turtle that their life starts in the sand and after its journey to their future begins. Somehow I agree with this idea. As I imagined the complicate and hard life that a sea turtle must have I also recall how the life of a student could be as hard and complicate. Sometimes the life of a student can be complicated, busy, confusing, struggling, happy, sad, depressing, demanding and joyful and so on and so forth.
Richard Rodriguez?s essay, Hunger of Memory, narrates the course of his educational career. Rodriguez tells of the unenthusiastic and disheartening factors that he had to endure along with his education such as isolation and lack of innovation. It becomes apparent that Rodriguez believes that only a select few go through the awful experiences that he underwent. But actually the contrary is true. The majority of students do go through the ?long, unglamorous, and demeaning process? of education, but for different reasons (Rodriguez, 68). Instead of pursuing education for the sake of learning, they pursue education for the sake of job placement.
In Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” he attempts to portray the idea that perspective can be skewed by another’s story, personal experience, and other factors that lead people to have these expectations of a sight or study that lessen the experience. He demonstrates this when he makes mention of the tourists at the Grand Canyon, and the Biology student getting compared to the Falkland Islander. The facts he presents are true, but Percy does not go into detail about individual cases leading to a generalized essay that does not show that each individual account is different, and not all expectations are changed from other information given to people will taint the learning environment or the experience, and because of this the points that are not mentioned as well as Percy’s thoughts will be explained and expanded on.
Many of the readings that we have studied in class have discussed the idea of human beings and our relationships with nature. The different authors we’ve studied and the works we’ve analyzed share different views of this relationship – a very interesting aspect to study. Human relationships with nature are truly timeless – nature can have the same effects on humans now as it did millions of years ago. Two of the works in particular which offered differing views on this relationship were “Entrance to the Woods” by Wendell Berry and “The Invented Landscape” by Frederick Turner.
The working class stay working and the middle class stay being middle. Author Nick Tingle, wrote “The vexation of class”, he argues that the working class and the middle class are separated based on culture and the commonplace. Tingle uses his own personal experiences and Ethos, to effectively prove his point about the difference in class; although, Tingle also falls short by adding unnecessary information throughout the article that weakens his belief entirely.
In the article Against School, John Taylor Gatto compounds his extensive knowledge garnered from his prior years of teaching with his research from other sources to fully examine the faults of the American educational system. First, he investigates the existence of boredom, and why students often complain of being bored in class. He finds the system in itself promotes boredom in the classroom setting, as students are often merely learning how to learn, and not necessarily learning functional or relevant skills or material. The rudimentary arithmetic and writing lessons are undoubtedly necessitated, but their applications in higher level thinking can be all the more useful in practice. According to Gatto, the educational system is like a sifter; the small pieces of debris and sand are meant to fall behind and hold jobs in which they must perform menial labor, while those rocks who remain are destined to bear the fruits of success and pursue white-collar careers.
How do teachers attempt to control the way you understand the world? Paulo Freire, author of “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, declares that “Narration (with the teacher as the narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (216). Freire’s statement implies that teaching utilizing the banking concept shifts the role of students as learners to robots that receive data and execute orders given by their programmers (teachers) but do not actually recognize the significance of the information. I agree with Freire 's interpretations because even though my role in high school was a student, my continuous encounters with banking
Education is defined as, “The act or process of educating or being educated, the knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process, a program of instruction of a specified kind or level, the field of study that is concerned with the pedagogy of teaching and learning, as well as an instructive or enlightening experience” (No author). People begin their education from day one till the day they die. Every day we learn new things in different ways. Whether someone is just telling us some random fact or you are sitting in a classroom being lectured by a professor. The main focus of this classical argument involves the learning that is done in the classroom or lecture hall in the schools of America today. The question arose as to which style of teaching is most effective in sparking the minds of the receivers to make them become transformers of their education? Would the “banking concept” of teaching be more effective, where “the scope of the action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (pg. 260). Or would the “problem posing” style of teaching be the most effective, where by “responding to the essence of consciousness—intentionally—rejects communiqués and embodies communications. It epitomizes the special characteristic of consciousness” (pg. 265). In this essay I intend persuade you the audience to take in my experiences and the experience of two other authors, whom I will be showing you later, and take a look from my point of view.
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
The fact that Percy Jackson has friends is incredible. It’s an unshakable fact that any friend of his within a ten mile radius will be in a life or death situation with him by dinner, and they aren’t always so lucky as him. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Over the course of the five-part contemporary young adult series Percy Jackson & The Olympians, titular character Percy Jackson must embrace his Greek God parentage and save Olympus with the help of his fellow demigods. The aim of this paper is to discuss his Hero’s Journey throughout the series, provide an in depth character analysis, and draw parallels between Percy and the three classic Greek heroes of mythology: Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau explains how a relationship with nature reveals aspects of the true self that remain hidden by the distractions of society and technology. To Thoreau, the burdens of nineteenth century existence, the cycles of exhausting work to obtain property, force society to exist as if it were "slumbering." Therefore, Thoreau urges his readers to seek a spiritual awakening. Through his rhetoric,Thoreau alludes to a "rebirth" of the self and a reconnection to the natural world. The text becomes a landscape and the images become objects, appealing to our pathos, or emotions, our ethos, or character, and our logos, or logical reasoning, because we experience his awakening. Thoreau grounds his spirituality in the physical realities of nature, and allows us to experience our own awakening through his metaphorical interpretations. As we observe Thoreau¹s awakening, he covertly leads us to our own enlightenment.
Every day throughout the world, teachers strive to attain the most from their students in every aspect of life, from effective communication and language skills, to the development of individualism and the concept of being the best that you could be. With the use of exams, class discussions, and written assignments, educators subconsciously reinforce the idea that success can only be achieved from within, with personal expression and dedication to each and every task faced in modern existence. The world, as we see it today, has not evolved by people copying one another’s ideas. It has evolved from the willingness of individuals to step up and make their intentions known, to bring about new ideas and concepts to forever change the environment in which we live. All too often, though, due to stress, insufficient time allowance, or just plain laziness, people take the quickest and most unproblematic approach to getting work done, in turn, failing to play their part in society’s evolution by retaining individual ideas and viewpoints.