On Education

These are segments of my first essay of summer quarter, while not graded yet, I'm relatively happy with what I turned out. I should know around monday how I did. Maybe I will post with that sort of update.


“Rule 2: General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. Rule 3: General duties of a teacher; pull everything out of your students” states Sister Corita Kent in her Immaculate Heart Art Department Rules. Many people, myself included, hold onto this image of college academia as a place in which great ideas are created and shared, where the minds of students and professors alike are opened up at the beginning of the day and by the end are bursting with ideas, good and bad, needing to be sorted. It’s a place that instigates change or at least it used to. In reality, there is very little pulling going on in any educational environment anymore. Students aren’t awed by the knowledge of their teachers and teachers more often than not aren’t willing to learn from their students. The pedestal that college had been sitting on is coming crashing down around us. More and more, students of America are seeing college education as a right rather than a privilege. Even I am guilty of assuming that college was just going to happen, that I didn’t even have to try to get there. By the time I finished high school, my opinion of academia was so distorted that I didn’t even want to be a part of it. I wanted to lead a bohemian life. I moved to Seattle and enrolled in community college simply because I had nothing better to do. And from here, this place which Professor X would most likely classify as a school of last resort, I have caught glimpses of that idealistic academia, and realized that I want to be among the great minds of the world and am ready to work my ass off to get there.
The truth is, not everyone has the self discipline required for college, I certainly didn’t have it when I started. Many students don’t realize that school is a tool they need to use in order to better themselves, a tool given to them in which they actually have to put an effort in to get something in return. An educated mind is one of the greatest tools a person can have. Robert Henri, in his piece On Education illustrates what college - and school in general – used to and should still be for every student involved. He states, “The student should know that the school will be good for him only to the degree that he makes it good.” Illustrating that a student must be self-disciplined, have an open mind, a positive attitude about situations, and be willing to work incredibly hard in order to succeed in becoming an educated person. Sister Corita makes this point in her rules as well, “Rule 5: Be self disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow them in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.” For me, the best way to realize the necessity of self discipline was to fail once. I didn’t want to do it again, so I got my act together. And I’m starting to be able to see a better future for myself. This self discipline is an act of will, and I’m afraid other students, particularly those in Adult Education programs, have already been through school once or those that are better suited for a vocational education route, but are required to be in a traditional college environment for work, have a much more difficult time achieving that amount of discipline. This is destroying college as an elite educational institution. Maybe the best way for these students to succeed is to follow, as Sister Corita said, to find someone wise or smart and follow them, to learn by example. Although, sometimes a bad example is the best way to understand how you want to be. As Robert Henri so accurately pointed out, “He may equally learn from the strong and the weak students.”
One of my middle school teachers opened her class with the phrase, “Knowledge is power” and I don’t agree with any other phrase more. I feel the need to point out that there are several types of knowledge and intelligence, that just because a person is not a good writer, plumber, scientist, carpenter, mathematician, or musician doesn’t make them stupid. No one is good at everything and not everyone can be good at college. Would college writing and literature classes even help them? As Professor X muses, “Will having read Invisible Man make a police officer less likely to indulge in racial profiling? Will a familiarity with Steinbeck make him more sympathetic to the plight of the poor, so that he might understand the lives of those who simply cannot get their taillights fixed? Will it benefit the correctional officer to have read The Autobiography of Malcolm X? The health-care worker Arrowsmith? Should the child-welfare officer read Plath’s Daddy?” While I am of the opinion that literature is one of the few ways to truly understand people and situations different from you and your own, I can’t imagine how reading a book like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina would truly help the education of a police officer, carpenter, or welder. Their intelligence is simply better suited to a different environment. America, for whatever reason began to see this fact as classist. Maybe it would be best for everyone if we took a step backwards in our thinking.