All posts by j.abdullah

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Names and Labels Replacing Qualifications

This is a response to Eric’s Post :https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/rethinkeducation/?author=19427

Eric wrote about the relationship between Background and Education, and how they correlate with one another. He basically stated that nowadays, it does not really matter about the quality of education you actually receive at an institution, but how that institution is regarded by society. He made the conclusion that nowadays, in terms of intelligence and education, people make judgments on other people based on what their personal background is, what school they went to, and how prestigious the school’s name is. For example, if a student went to Harvard University, and took the easiest professors and graduated rather easily, that student would still be seen as more educated than a student who graduated from Baruch College, even if the professors gave harder work than the Harvard professors.

He applied this theory to Professor Lupin in Harry Potter. Even though Professor Lupin was a great professor, he was a werewolf, so parents did not trust him teaching their kids, “they will not want a werewolf teaching their children” (423). In this case, the parents did not really care about the Professor’s ability to educate, but rather his background.

I also agree that nowadays, education and skill is being ignored and replaced by bizarre things, such as background. Names and labels are replacing qualifications.

Intro Exercise #1

School is supposed to be a place where students go to become educated and ultimately achieve their career interests. The question is, does it really fulfill its purpose? The answer is maybe, or maybe not. But one thing is for sure; going to school is definitely not the only way to become educated. There are many other methods to becoming educated besides the traditional institutional schooling, and all it takes to achieve it is ones own desire and motivation to learn. Perhaps, the best way to learn is by teaching yourself, because in this way, you are able to focus more on things that matter to you and study things that are relevant to your interests, without being confined to the limitations of forced institutional methods. In Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, Jame’s Marcus Bach’s vision of a “Buccanner Scholar, is embodied by the historical figure Malcolm X in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X’s own desire to learn ultimately resulted in his achievement of becoming an educated person. Malcolm X did not need to go to school to become educated, his strong motivation and persistence attributed to his success, all while being confined within prison walls. This supports the dissenting notion that attending school is not necessarily the only way to become educated like society traditionally perceives it to be.

Malcolm X the Buccaneer Scholar

There are many other methods to becoming educated besides the traditional institutional schooling, and all it takes to achieve it is ones own desire and motivation to learn. Perhaps, the best way to learn is by teaching yourself, because in this way, you are able to focus more on things that matter to you and study things that are relevant to your interests, without being confined to the limitations of forced institutional methods. James Marcus Bach’s vision of a “Buccanner Scholar”, is a successful example of this notion and is embodied by the historical figure Malcolm X, as Malcolm X’s own desire to learn ultimately resulted in his achievement of becoming an educated person.

Process of Writing, Freedom, and Manhood

This is a response to Mohammed Uddin’s Post (https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/rethinkeducation/?author=18281)

I completely agree with Mohammed’s viewpoint on the transformation that Jefferson in A Lesson Before Dying by Earnest Gaine, and Malcom X in The Autobiography of Malcolm X go through while in jail. He states how the people that Jefferson and Malcolm X were when they arrived in jail were different than the people that they were when Malcolm X was freed and the time of Jefferson’s death.

Both characters went through similar transitions in jail; they both became more educated. Jefferson was helped by a well-educated teacher named Grant Wiggins, whereas Malcolm X, who was completely illiterate – “I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional.” (Malcolm X) – taught himself. This education held a key role in both characters’ transition into manhood. Education made both of them more aware of their surroundings and helped them understand life on a deeper level.

Mohammed used the quote, “Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples.” (Malcolm X). This was a very good choice for a quote as it conveyed the idea that Malcolm X has now become more aware of what is going on in his surroundings, due to his newfound literacy.

The relationship between writing, freedom, and manhood is more like a chain. Writing, which includes the attribute of literacy, allows the characters to gain more knowledge through different mediums. It also gives them a voice; it gives them the freedom and opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings in a different way other than speaking. It also gave them more freedom to think due to the higher level of knowledge they now held. Ultimately, this attributes to their transition into manhood, because manhood is attained when one understands himself and his life. Manhood is characterized as a state where one is free to think for himself, express himself, and a state in which one is not ignorant of his surroundings.

 

 

Alternative Schooling Method

1)  Remembering that your Alternative Schooling Moment (ASM) must happen outside of a traditional schooling environment (college or secondary campus, tutoring centers, or community class spaces), please write two paragraphs describing your group’s ASM.

Our group Alternative Schooling Moment (ASM) is a tutoring/mentorship center that is not affiliated with the public school system in any way. It is a large center situated in Brooklyn. We are open for only 3 hours each day and employ people from various fields to better accommodate the various students’ interests in their careers and their lives. Most of what we do is teach things that students do not understand in a much more interactive way than just making them read books. More importantly, we give the students advice that can’t be found in books, such as how to apply what they have learned and use that to achieve their goals.

This center is largely focused on creating an interactive learning environment with the students. For example, if someone has trouble with physics, instead of reiterating all the equations that they have read off of books, we will take them outside and show them through different activities what those equations are actually representing. Also, we focus more on the skills that are relevant to each students’ objectives in life. For example, if someone wanted to be an actor, we won’t bother teaching them anything about Chemistry. We would have one of our teachers who is in the field of acting teach the student using our methods. We would then build a foundation for their acting career by doing things such as connecting them with agents. Overall, this center is a place where people attend not to only learn about subjects they don’t understand, but how they can manage their lives in the real world.  

2)  Who will be the audience/students of your ASM? Why?

The main audience in our ASM are students who are mostly in high school and in college. High school and more so, college, are pivotal parts of a student’s life and are the building blocks of a student’s career. We feel that it is essential to enhance the relevant skills a college student has before entering a particular workforce. Many college students today are strictly enforced to formal education; consisting of taking tests, writing papers, and doing homework. We believe that interactively teaching the students will allow them to be adept in many academic fields. We are not limited to college and high school students, however, anyone who is trying to get on the path of starting a career would be part of our audience as well. This includes adults who have already completed their education, but want to learn more about how they could put the stuff they learned to use for their general welfare.
We will divide our audience by age and grade level. High school and college students will be separate, however, they will be interacting amogst each other frequently in our center. It is important for all our students to be sociable to promote an enjoyable way of learning instead of just a quiet lecture with no communication as we see in regular schools.  

3) Remembering that learning objectives are active, please list the three main objectives of your ASM?

  1. Our first objective is to find out what subject/field doe s each student needed help with, then assign a teacher from that particular field to work with him/her individually, where they will teach them using interactive methods.
  2. Our second objective is to help students to apply what they have learned to real life application and helps students to develop/strengthen skills that are relevant to daily life.
  3. Our last objective is to set the students up and build a foundation for their career goals.

4) How do those three main objectives reflect your group’s philosophy of education and school?

Our first objective reflects on our philosophy of education by understanding what exactly the students are trying to learn. Once we learn that information, we can further develop methods to create an interactive way to help the student learn that particular subject. This shows how we put a major emphasis on practical education as oppose to formal education. Our philosophy revolves around the idea that students should be able to learn things in a way that they can put to use of it also known as practical education. By understanding what the students want to learn, we can guide them in the right direction.
The second objective is the vocal point of our philosophy. We want our students to apply what they have learned and enhance their everyday skills in order to develop their education. Our last objective is the impact that our philosophy makes. With our unique interactive learning methods, we allow students to build a foundation for their career. Again, we want students to be able to use what they learn in their careers, and that is one of our primary goals at our center.

 

5)  Which two of the readings does your group’s philosophy on schooling and education respond to (either by supporting or challenging)? Please provide textual evidence of the relationship between that reading and your group’s philosophy.

We believe that learning doesn’t merely happen through just the completion of coursework. Successful learning comes from hands-on learning experience. John Locke once said “From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded….our observation, about sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves in that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking” (Locke, 2). Observational based teaching techniques creates relevant, engaging, memorable educational experiences that effectively address the specific challenges that learners face. Making connections between things read off of books and the real-life observations of these topics immediately registers the topic in the learner’s mind. We believe that this is not just because the learner can memorize the material better with observations, but because since the learner is now able to make more sense of the topic and understand it deeper, they will not forget it.  Ultimately, this sharpens our thinking ability with more practice and exposure to observational learning, which is very beneficial in a person’s long-term learning career.

Particular experiences such as traveling and exploring  can be regarded as an essential tactic to learning. This is why we will often times take the students out on trips to do fieldwork. In Frankenstein by Mary Shelly, the monster didn’t obtain education through a schooling system. He also wasn’t taught to read or write by friends or family.  He did however, have the ability to explore his environment.  By traveling around every day and observing his surroundings, the monster was able to gain knowledge about society.  This relates to our philosophy in that it supports our objective of teaching students in a way where they can see and understand things for themselves, with a bit of our help..  We believe that teaching students in the form of interactions engages them better as opposed to reading countless textbook pages. Frankenstein’s monster serves as a perfect example because he used nature to learn and not textbooks. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock” (Shelly, 13).  According to Shelly,  knowledge learned through experience allows a person to store more information in the long-term memory. This supports our philosophy because we believe that observational learning methods are more efficient than reading words off of paper.

Education is Strength

Rousseau said that, “We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education” (Rousseau 1). He claims that education provides us with strength, hence without it, we are weak.

Malcolm X had very low literacy skills before he went to prison. To everyone else, he was just another oppressed black man in a white-ruled society. He was unable to write strong, articulate letters, ”  I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there. I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional. How would I sound writing in slang, the way 1 would say it” (X 1). Basically, he was unable to convey his ideas.

This fueled his desire to learn. After studying the entire dictionary while in prison, he gained the ability to read and write, as well as the ability to articulate his thoughts. After becoming an educated man, he was then able to speak out against the oppression black-Americans were facing in society, and gain the support of many people nationwide. The way I see it, Malcolm X was always a strong man, but without any education, he could not put any of that strength to good use, until he became self-educated.

 

Cruelty in Education Discourages Learning

This post is a response to Jenny Chou’s post.

The distinction Jenny made between one of Rousseau’s theories and Jose’s experience with schooling and education in Joseph Zobel’s novel Black Shack Alley was very clear. She made a clear statement conveying how Rousseau felt about education being received in a cruel way, “cruel education… burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions and begins by making him miserable…” (Rousseau 4).

The connection made between this statement by Rousseau and the experiences Jose and his classmates had in the novel was very good. Jose and his classmates were beaten in school for not knowing answers. “scold or punish [Raphael]…with a bamboo cane on his legs, or a ruler in the palm of his hand” (Zobel 65). She stated that often times, the teachers would look for an excuse or reason to beat the kids, or at least that is how it seemed to the kids in the novel.

Obviously, if a child is anticipating physical pain when going to school in return for some education, the child would not think it is worth it. The student will be very discouraged to go to school because he won’t be able to look past the physical pain. Children have a very fragile state of mind, and any bad experiences may cause repercussions that last throughout their whole life. Therefore, constant beatings at school would make children hate learning, which would indeed negatively impact them as they get older. Therefore, this method of educational discipline would defeat the whole purpose of schooling.

Intellectual Freedom Through Learning from Experience

“From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded” (Locke,1). It could not have been said any better by one of the greatest philosophers in history. According to Locke, knowledge is derived from experiences in one’s life and allows a person to nurture their mind. Common knowledge in particular, can be better understood and learned through personal observations, sensations towards observations, and actions. It is essential for a person to put use of their skills of learning because it leads to a deeper understanding of their world.  We believe that practical education is the best way to develop a person’s knowledge because it enables the personal to have an enjoyable educational experience, the concepts are better stored in long-term memory and it allows for an unrestricted, free-thinking learning experience.

The scope of practical education is very wide, it can be an educational trip, experiment, or even daily interaction. Practical education concerns the process of learning through observations and actions, rather than through the classic institutionalized way of learning, which is sitting in a classroom and hearing about it from someone else. However, can we put our learning and how we end up perceiving the world in the hands of people in an infamously flawed educational system? Are we really setting ourselves up for success?  Students are provided with knowledge rather than wisdom. It is typical for students to be forced to cram and memorize material to pass a test, just to forget everything right after the exam is over. Students have to try to memorize things they read on paper. However, with hands-on learning, they will automatically remember things just like how their other life experiences are stored in their memory.

Memorization of plain text does not bring any further understanding of the concept unless we manage to transfer the knowledge to action. In Emile: or A Treatise on Education, Rousseau believes that books are the least useful instrument to teach his pupil because he think “they[books] only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about” (Rousseau, 20). What he is saying is that when we “learn” about certain topics in books, we can only relay the information we have read, perhaps in most cases without a true understanding of what we are talking about. Therefore, “learning” from books can be deemed more memorization than actual conceptual understanding.

One example that supports real life experience being essential in obtaining knowledge is found in Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.” (Shelly, 13) According to Shelly, the monster was using his environment as a way to gain knowledge. He didn’t know how to read or write, however, he was able to observe his surroundings in order to communicate with others. He didn’t have to go through years of schooling, yet he was able to be intellectually on par with society.  

When education is received through practical methods, it not only enables for a more efficient learning method, but also enhances sensibility. Observation is the most valuable tool for understanding. As John Locke once said “our observation, about sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.” (Locke, 2) Observations allow us to understand things, and think about them through our own scope. That is one thing that is lacking in institutional education, the freedom to think through your own scope; everyone is always forced to think the way textbooks and teachers want them to think, which may result in hindered learning.

 

Frederick Douglass’s Road to Enlightenment

Frederick Douglass has spent his entire life of misery in search for one thing, happiness, or enlightenment. Douglass knew that reaching enlightenment was not an easy task for colored people like him in the mid 1800s, but that did not discourage him. Douglass’s realizations for how to reach enlightenment were in correlation to Immanuel Kant’s philosophies on enlightenment. Kant once advised those seeking enlightenment to, “have courage to make use of your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment”(Kant 1). What he is saying is that in order to reach enlightenment, one much think for themselves and find their own way to enlightenment, without being influenced by traditional societal perceptions. Douglass followed this motto and took the initiative to learn how to read and write in order to become educated. After becoming educated, a train that was not very common amongst colored people in the mid 1800s, Douglass soon realized what his own self-worth was. He then realized that his life, as well as the lives of all the other colored people, was not to be subjective to other people. Thus began his journey in spreading the message and helping lead other people into enlightenment, by educating people and teaching them how to think for themselves.