The Gap Between Theory and Practice

Today in class, we talked about our first days at Ase and what we carried away from the experience—the most marked common thread between all of us was the sense that things didn’t go exactly as we had planned in one way or another. Whether that meant that we confronted issues we didn’t expect to, or that we ran into issues we expected but didn’t know how to handle–the day was an eye-opening experience for everyone.

One of the most shocking concepts we confronted was that fact that these kids were real people with real lives–that we’d been studying critical pedagogy and culturally relevant teaching and had all the theoretic jargon and ideas down, but were at a loss when it came time to apply those ideas. The kids challenged us with serious questions  about the curriculum, the work involved, and why they should be at Ase to begin with–and while we had the cookie-cutter theoretically proper answers, it was undeniably appropriate for us to use them. Because we couldn’t bring ourselves to talk at those kids like they were textbooks or robots or troubled things that just needed a single cookie-cutter, theoretically proper response to “fix” them.

Others of us confronted issues with the kids’ motivation–we had expectations for them to come to Ase and apply their energies to their passions, and while some did, others still grappled with self-confidence and fear of the work they would have to do to achieve what they wanted to achieve. We toyed with the idea of “duping” them into taking challenging courses (advertising the courses well, but not mentioning the work load until they’re already enrolled)–but we also brought up the notion that we wanted he kids to know the work was challenging simply so that when they chose to take the course, they would be choosing to challenge themselves. But the big lingering question was how could we get kids to appreciate the longterm benefits of hard work?

The challenges didn’t stem solely from the children, however—we had our fair share of challenges with the staff as well. From last minute cancellations to classroom environments that left something to be desired to trouble coming out of our shells and getting to know the kids, we also recognized that we shouldn’t only hope for the growth and development of the children, but also of ourselves in many capacities as well.

We were also pleasantly surprised in many ways too–from energetic and enthusiastic kids to lively and thought-provoking discussion, we realized that we should check the notion that we were going into Ase to “fix” kids–some of them came into the program with the right mindset and were just eager to further engage us and be challenged in general.

To wrap it up, we discussed how we can close the gap between theory and practice–to make our mission manifest and not simply put on the table in the classroom from 4:30-7:30 and quickly forgotten. While we must definitely have open minds and be prepared to teach and be taught by the kids, we must also have confidence that we are not starting from scratch, and that theory and practice don’t have to be separate concepts–we just need to give ourselves the time to figure out how to link the two together.

Separate Schools, Separate Worlds

Working two jobs, already enrolled in five classes, and preparing to apply to grad school, I thought a sixth class was the last thing I needed this semester. However, the first chapter of The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools changed that. The class itself touches upon sensitive issues that I have been dying to explore, but the chapter The Challenges and Opportunities of Urban Education speaks to a number of phenomena that I have not only witnessed, but also experienced.

At thirteen years old, I faced the regular adolescent qualms experienced by most youth still in their awkward phases. Shorter than the average student, still portly from my most recent vacation to Antigua, West Indies, and with a disproportionately sized head, I struggled to come into my own. But unlike many of my peers, I had the added concerns of yet another new school. Though I had recently matriculated from my elementary school to the top public middle school in Brooklyn, it was only a year later that I was again switching schools, again becoming acclimated to a new environment. This time, I wasn’t going from a good public school to a better one, I was now attending private school.

My hour and fifteen-minute train ride from home to school each morning felt more like a trip in a rocket ship, taking off from one world and venturing to a distant other. In every aspect of life, there were stark differences between these two worlds. While at home, I was surrounded by similar faces, similar musical choices, and specific thought systems, when I was at school, I had only one thing in common with my peers, a no-nonsense approach to education. While I am extremely grateful for the opportunities I received and, I am forever indebted to those who help my academic dream become a reality, I cannot help but point out the serious structural flaws. It is in retrospect that I can use my education to second-guess my academic experience.

Though I can confidently say that I doubt that I would have made it Penn without the assistance of Prep for Prep, I cannot confidently say that the structure of the program is one that I can continue to whole-heartedly support. As it accomplishes great feats by having students from low-income environments gain access to these distant worlds, it does so within a horribly blemished system, and in some ways, perpetuates a cycle of inequality. TACP speaks about the ‘failing’ public school system and the way in which they are setup with the expectation for few to succeed and many to fail. Prep recognizes this ‘failure’ and trains the students in these schools, demonstrating academic commitment, integrity, courage and excellence, to make it in challenging private schools. However, when following educational empowerment and switching from public to private, other switches are imminent. Also, by assisting in the success of the public school standouts, Prep inadvertently adds to the myth of meritocracy, a flawed substantiation of the idea that “opportunity exists for anyone who wants it bad enough.” (3)

“To date, most resource-based efforts in high schools have focused on improving instruction and learning conditions, with the goal of increasing the number of students who are able to “escape” poverty and attend college—to “better themselves” or “move up.” Valenzuela (1999) has called this a subtractive model of school, one where urban students are asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of their school in exchange for access to college. This approach to schooling often reduces the life choices for urban non-white youth into a false binary—that of choosing between staying behind as a failure and “getting out” as a success.” (7)

During middle school, I never quite understood how in a matter of minutes, I could change none of my actions, yet go from being ghetto to white washed. Old enough to be bothered by the dynamic but too young to fully understand my dilemma, I did what few others were able to, I adapted. Though I was immersed in every aspect of ‘upper’ culture during the week, my strong presence in an all Black congregation kept me abreast and aware. Code switching became second nature and my identity became inherently linked to where I was. To be clear, I was never ashamed of my intellect, nor did I hide it, but what I did do was downplay my newly acquired soft skills, the compass I used to navigate a world not my own. They simply weren’t needed in some environments, so I had no need to employ them. To the best of my ability, I made conscientious decisions to ‘get out’, but frequently return, both in thought and action. I was very much in the affluent white world, but I was definitely not of it.

The underlying issue at the center of my experience, and that of so many other non-white youth face, is simple. Educational success is so intrinsically tied to affluent white culture, that to truly achieve it, one must shed aspects of their own culture and adopt some aspects of another. Though I was able to make it by adapting, I shouldn’t have had to. When considering a society’s failure to educate its non-white, affluent constituents, a problem becomes clear. People should not have to change themselves in order to achieve academic success. “To be effective, urban education reform movements must begin to develop partnerships with communities that provide young people the opportunity to be successful while maintaining their identities as urban youth.”

Collin Devon

What is this “Culture” in Culturally Relevant Pedagogy?

Stuart Hall – Race, the Floating Signifier

So what does “culture” mean anyway? In light of our recent discussions on culturally relevant pedagogy (and critical pedagogy more broadly), I ask this question to revisit the Ase philosophy and ultimately determine how Ase’s students can be best served by our educational approach.

The title of this post invokes cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s essay, “What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture,” in which he lays to rest notions of race as a biological reality, arguing instead that “blackness” cannot be reduced to any singular idenity or cuture (see the video clip above for a brief summary of this argument). Accordingly, the notion of black “culture” has grown increasingly fragile. As numerous scholars, to include Penn’s own John Jackson (see Real Black) have debunked the concept of racial “authenticity,” the dynamicity and diversity of “black culture” continues to challenge our most basic assumptions about who and what is “black.”

As an anthropologist, the idea of “culture” laid the foundation for the origins of my discipline. However, it is important to note that the “culture concept” arose alongside seventeeth-century colonial discourse, in an effort to legitimate the European domination of subaltern peoples. Organizing groups along a racially-ordered “chain of being,” with “whites” representing the most advanced cultural forms, and Africans the least, “culture” sought to deemphasize the individual, instead classifying peoples according to holistic, racially-essentialist social categories.

How then, can we distance ourselves from such oppressive uses of “culture,” moving toward a liberatory “culturally relevant” approach? What I think Hall best calls attention to, both in the essay and the film, is the contradictory nature of race: biologically unsubstantiated yet socially impactful, intangible yet capable of producing tangible societal divisions, conflicts, and violence.

For Ase students, coming of age in a moment steeped in the rhetoric of racial fluidity, but nonetheless in a society still marked explicity by racial divisions, Ase, and cuturally relevant education more broadly, faces a dual purpose. First, Ase must respond to the racially hierarchical society in which we live. Students of all backgrounds, but most immediately students of African-descent, continue to be deprived of the history and experiences of people of color. But as Stuart Hall suggests, and Paulo Freire notes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Ase must also encourage its students to achive “critical consciousness,” a self-awareness of their own oppression through a critique of racial, gendered, and sexual essentialism.

In this fashion, we have to avoid reducing “culturally relevancy” to our own conceptions of “blackness” that may or may not be shared by those we are mentoring and instructing. Only through an honest engagement with students’ individual backgrounds, interests, and passions can true cultural relevancy be achieved.

Still, though, can we uphold the historical achievements of African-descended peoples while simultaneously critiquing race as a social consturction? The work of W.E.B. Du Bois displays the potential for such a possibility, as his project to recover the history of continental and diasporic Africans (see The Negro (1915), Black Folk, Then and Now (1939), and The World and Africa (1946)), overlapped and existed in concert with overt critiques of the race concept (see Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920) and Black Reconstruction (1939)).

Following my earlier post on the concept of a “Du Boisian pedagogy,” I believe his work may be a good jumping off point for further discussion on the significance and faculty of culturally relevant approaches. And from his work I ask again, what is this “culture” in culturally relevant pedagogy anyway?

Upcoming Event: 10/27 @ the International House

Ase and Critical Pedagogy

“(1) There is no teaching without learning; (2) teaching is not just transferring knowledge; (3) teaching is a human act” (Freire). These are the three core principles of pedagogy as defined by Freire. They also provided the framework for our class discussion around the reading for the week and Ase programming. Our discussion grew out of what we define as critical pedagogy. It moved to how we plan to use it and implement the tools of YPAR style learning into Ase. I will outline the discussion and provide my own reflection on the meaning and usage of critical pedagogy in relation to Ase.

In class we defined critical pedagogy as a method of rethinking the classroom space, a type of revolution of the traditional classroom as we know it. Within this space there would be a type of reciprocal learning taking place between the student and the teacher. Where the teacher will not simply be a giver of knowledge and the student a receiver, but a space where both will be able to learn and teach together. The roles of both the teacher and the student will be more organic and allowed to grow and change depending on what is being studied. This shift in tradition will enable the students to become critical thinkers about the world around them. The purpose is to provide students with the tools to understand their positions in society and in the classroom and the ability to challenge and change that position. This is seen as one of the primary goals for the incorporation of critical pedagogy into the Ase program.

There are some questions that surround the incorporation of the critical pedagogical method and the Ase classroom. How do we incorporate it? Has it been incorporated into our curriculum? The initial question stemmed from a variety of questions that were asked during class. The first being, do Ase students have a voice? The answer, however, was complex. The Ase students have a voice within the program, but not a large one. They participate in surveys and they interact the mentors and directors of the program on a one on one, personal basis, providing them with a voice automatically though the relationship that Ase facilitates. However, the challenge is in the learning environment is a necessity to provide a more open space for them to use their voice. The first way that we determined would give the students more voice was by identifying their learning style and working with that learning style to teach the student. This would create a more open environment than their normal classroom transforming the mentor position into a position of guide or facilitator rather than instructor. Furthermore, we would be giving them a tool of understanding themselves; this would help them with studying and test preparation by helping them to understand why certain things are more difficult for them. Another way the students would be given more voice is to allow them to take an active part in the creation of the rules of the classroom. In my experience this policy has not always been as effective as I would like. I think it is dependent on the age and maturity level of the students that you’re working with. My concern leads to the next question of how much freedom is too much freedom. We concluded that there is a distinct balance that needs to be created. A space where the student is given the structure in order to learn the necessary skills as well as freedom enough to challenge what he learning and the teacher himself. Framing this ability to challenge, and morphing it into the appropriate avenues is important; because this skill of challenging and questioning in an appropriate manner is one that is necessary in the students day to day environment. Creating this environment with in Ase is challenging because of the nature of the Ase program as an African centered program. This implies a certain type of education it is difficult to navigate how much of our own personal politics should be brought into the classroom. We noted that we automatically bring in personal politics through our teaching styles. But we should give the students the tools to develop their own ideas that may differ from our own, even in regards to what they feel about African centered thought.  Ase through using critical pedagogy seeks to empower the students’ voice and allow them to use that voice.

I would like to use critical pedagogy through YPAR in the seminar that I want to develop for Ase about violence. The YPAR system has been apart of seminars in the past and I would like to build upon its usage. I participated in a seminar called the Philadelphia Negro taught my sophomore year and one of the most poignant moments of that semester was when the students were able to walk through West Philly and identify the differences and the change in the neighborhood as you moved away from Penn’s campus. Afterwards we discussed the differences and why these changes occur. The part that I feel was lacking what the response. The students weren’t clearly able to conceptualize what they could do or how they could speak out about the changes in their environment. In my seminar I would like to explore how violence affects their lives. I want the students to conduct their own studies regarding the murder rates in Philadelphia and hypothesize why it is the way is it; and why it is “normal” or “just the way things are”. Was it always this way? I also want the students to develop their own ways to stop violence or at least mobilize a movement toward awareness and change. My goal is for the students to critique the reaction of the police, the community, and the government to the murder rates. This is my attempt at using YAPR and making teaching a human act.

Makeda Farley

Critical Pedagogy Revisited

Based on the readings and our class discussion, the concept of critical pedagogy is about including students in the process of education. This week, I reflected on the more personal aspect of critical pedagogy. Specifically, in this post, I am going to focus on my concept of critical pedagogy, how I feel it currently functions within Aseand a critique of Ase as it stands. The readings this week continued our class discussion in two major ways. The first is that it looked at the role of individuality within the scope of education. The second is the idea of research being used as a tool to recognize and stand against social constructions. Both of these points will be addressed throughout this post.

Critical pedagogy seeks to teach students to take an active role in their individual education. I want to start by saying that students of color know they are disadvantaged. In my opinion we need to provide students with the tools to explore why disadvantages exist and what they can do in their classrooms to challenge, and hopefully change, the way that society impacts their ability to perform. This can be achieved in the following manner. It is important to show students the importance of learning various kinds of information. It is more than just contextualizing the lessons for them. They need to be able to find personal fulfillment in the subjects that they take up. Furthermore, students should recognize education as a way to further and eventually achieve their personal goals. The second is to

Breaking down the power dynamic between teacher and student is critical to empowering the students and ultimately their individual communities. As Freire mentions, and I truly believe, creating a power dynamic where the teacher serves as a dictator and the students are constantly subjected to the teachers law, students are incapable of participating in their education. This is not to say that the students should “revolt” against teacher, but rather that they should all work together in some form of companionship. The student and teacher should both be able to accept their shortcomings as well as recognize and utilize their strengths. This allows everyone to work together to achieve a better-educated society.

In Ase, it would be (relatively) easy to break down the power dynamic between educator and student. This is possible for two main reasons. The first is that the Ase kids know that we are students ourselves. I feel that this helps them relate to us in a way that they may not be able to with their schoolteachers. This is especially true with the older kids where we serve primarily as mentors to many of them. The second reason is that we have a lot of flexibility as far as curriculum, methodology, and subject material. Because there are few standardized levels of achievement for Ase students, we can teach them practical lessons in an unorthodox manner. It also takes pressure off the kids because they can learn in a more relaxed environment. This leads me to believe that the best way to empower our students is to harvest genuine interest in a variety of topics. Once we plant the seed of knowledge, the Ase students will know which direction they want to grow.

My personal goal for this semester is to allow the students to help shape the law curriculum to address their personal interests. While I do have an outline for the entire semester, there are certain assignments, topics, and rules that I wish to encourage the students to vote on and ultimately shape the progression of the class. This includes things like writing a list of rules as a unit, selecting teams and team positions in which everyone performs a duty, and voting on formats for projects and discussions. By allowing them to have a stronger role in their education, I hope they are able to delve into topics that they enjoy learning about, especially in regards to the legal field. Additionally, I hope this format fosters a genuine interest in guiding their own education and working towards their personal goals.

Building the Bridge

Yesterday’s class discussion was extremely open and honest as we talked about fear and possibilities in the classroom We unpacked many of the nuances of cultural relevance, or more specifically, the humanness necessary in education. For Black students, whether walking the halls of one of the nation’s top prep schools or universities, or sitting in an underfunded, low-performing school, there are questions regarding fitting in, knowing/understanding self, and wearing different masks. A culturally relevant, or culturally sensitive space can help students feel more relaxed, more real, more willing to join the learning community. Again, this goes for both the junior high and high school students that Ase will work with, as well as the Ase mentors and staff.

One of the most significant goals for me across the board is making meaningful connections. Yesterday I tried to link core tenets of what I call a “Du Boisian Pedagogy” to Ase’s central practices and frameworks. I think that most of the students saw the links, but most also had a decent familiarity with Du Bois and appreciation of him as a luminary in Penn’s history and in the African-American / Pan-African struggle. How do we introduce a teenage Ase high school student to the same sort of dynamic? Even if we take on an exploration of contemporary Philadelphia neighborhoods as our primary project, and use Du Bois’ Philadelphia Negro has a critical reference, how do we bridge the two in a relevant way whereby students will want to develop the appreciation of history that we see as valuable? Our point is that history informs us; what happened yesterday set the stage for now. A second point would be understanding the plight of Du Bois (breaking barriers and preconceived notions, but still constantly facing racism on numerous fronts). Young people today may or may not care about any of this. If we simply tell them that “this is important; you should know this,” but do not motivate them to want to pay attention, or even more ideally, do their own exploration of Du Bois and others, then we are repeating the same patterns of disconnection that they typically experience in many of their daily classes.

We must strategically build the necessary bridges and ignite students’ thirst for knowledge. This is much easier said than done. This is why some teachers simply teach from the text, the way their instructional plans guide them. It’s much easier to do that – and be able to claim that students had the opportunity to experience the district requirements (irregardless of the outcomes that these directives produce, or the wants/needs of the students) – than to find things that really pull students in and have them taking on the directed learning process themselves.

We commented yesterday that the most ideal schools, or learning communities, don’t feel like “school” in the oppressive, mundane sense. Why shouldn’t school be fun… useful… engaging, rather than a space to countdown the hours? If we can help more students make critical links to the familiar and the new, stimulating a knowledge creation process, then maybe we can finally bridge the gaps.

Brian Peterson

On Definitions and Language

[Children] don’t have the vocabulary to express what they see…

- James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers”

…young people learn through research about complex power relations, histories of struggle, and the consequences of oppression. They begin to re-vision and denaturalize the realities of their social worlds and then undertake forms of collective challenge based on the knowledge garnered through their critical inquiries.

- Cammarota and Fine, “Youth Participatory Action Research: A Pedagogy for Transformational Resistance”

—

The selections above describe two markedly different ways of being politically conscious in America. And, in many ways, they are distant points in the development of a political consciousness. The first expresses how children, often children of color, recognize their surroundings without the linguistic arsenal–terms like “patriarchy” and “structural inequalities”–with which to analyze them. The second features informed, learned action.

This begs the questions: What bridges the two? What influence results in the type of activists Cammarota and Fine describe?

In the context of this course, the answer is culturally relevant education.

During the inaugural meeting of EDUC 245, I introduced myself—first, as Kaneesha—by saying that, for me, the course was the culmination of a certain journey. I’ve been involved with Ase Academy since I was a second-semester freshman, when I’d just decided that Civic House organizations just weren’t for me, and my responsibilities were limited to the morning hours: tutoring during Learning Center and brunch with my mentee(s) at 1920 Commons. Since then, I’ve taken steps to conflate my ideas about service with my education at Penn.

But, my brief introductions omitted years of experiences and self-education. This journey truly began in my own childhood when, much like Baldwin’s claims, I didn’t have the vocabulary to express what I saw or experienced as one of very few children of color in my majority Roman Catholic, Italian- and Irish-American, middle-class Long Island village. My education there was by no means culturally relevant but, by the time I was a fifth-grader, asking my (very uncomfortable) teacher questions about the systematic rape of enslaved black women, I’d learned what it meant to educate oneself.

Because of a lifetime love of literature, I define culturally relevant education through the lens of literary study. In other words, in order to develop a critical lens in children of color, educators must expose them to diverse “histories,” encourage a critical “vocabulary,” and allow students to apply both to their personal “narratives.”

To continue, Culturally Relevant Education…

• expands the definition of American literature and the English language

To me, this means not only celebrating the works of Edwidge Danticat alongside that of Ernest Hemingway, but also recognizing the strength of linguistic traditions like African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).

• redefines the canon, but does not rest on token figures, and
  

In other words, limiting the study of Diasporic history to Martin Luther King, Jr., Marcus Garvey, and Nelson Mandela leaves much to be desired.

• is about recognizing your own narrative and its significance.
  

Students of color should recognize their stories as worthy of analysis.

—

I conclude with more questions.

In keeping with my very literary perspective, I wonder about “culturally relevant” as a descriptor, and the implications of such a term. “Culturally relevant” qualifies traditional “education,” analyzing rather than ignoring power dynamics, engaging marginalized voices. What are the goals for such a movement?

Does, or can, “culturally relevant” education ever blend into “education”?

Until next time,

kaneesha cherelle parsard

Escape Routes

After reading The Art of Critical Pedagogy, I kept flipping back to one point that resounded poignantly with me:

“To date, most resource-based efforts in high schools have focused on improving instruction and learning conditions, with the goal of increasing the number of students who are able to “escape” poverty and attend college—to “better themselves” or “move up.” Valenzuela (1999) has called this a subtractive model of school, one where urban students are asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of their school in exchange for access to college. This approach to schooling often reduces the life choices for urban non-white youth into a false binary—that of choosing between staying behind as a failure and “getting out” as a success.” (7)

For me, one of the main purposes of education is as a means to become well-versed and rigorous about one’s world, for the purposes of one day assuming the responsibility of re-organizing or maintaining a functional society. It’s end goal, in the grand scheme of things, should be to enable students to effectively understand and process the ideas of generations prior and to instill in them the necessary skills to keep abreast of a restlessly dynamic world. That is to say that, education should not be merely a process of instilling a set of facts and figures, but rather a process of instilling students with the necessary skills that will enable them to be effective, independent and consistent learners.

One of the greatest challenges to achieving this goal, however, is Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s aforementioned concern: the notion that (particularly non-white students from urban environments) must sacrifice their cultures for something else, something represented to be more respectable, or acceptable. For as long as I can remember, the explicitly expressed goal of my education has been so that I can “escape” my neighborhood, my surroundings, to rise up from underneath some sort of success-deflecting smog (which apparently my home community was surrounded by) and build a new life, never to return. My elementary and middle school educations took place in underserved urban (Brooklyn) schools, and my mentors in both places similarly sought to “get me out”, the further from certain parts of Brooklyn, the better. Which is how I eventually landed in my high school, an independent school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—on scholarship and forced not only to acclimate to a new cultural environment, but to slowly shed bits and pieces of my own culture—from the way I spoke to the way I dressed. It wasn’t until I came to Penn and started taking Africana Studies courses that I began to question why my culture and notions of respectability had to be kept in distinctly separate spheres.

I think Ase can and already does play a particularly important role in this process, simply by virtue of the fact that the program is Afrocentric in its approach. A key idea at the core of a pedagogy that can dismiss these sorts of notions is one that celebrates cultural heritage and difference, and presents achievement in a way that does not link it to a particular cultural standard (and especially does not propose education as a means to “escape” one’s presumably less respectable culture), while still presenting education in a way that makes it relevant to each student’s everyday life.

Petal Samuel

the purposes of my education

Our society is complex  – the populace is composed and influenced by many factors: race, gender, culture, faith, religion, political views, scruples, isms, and anxieties.  As a citizen of the globe, I must be able to understand the motivations behind people and the systems within which we interact.  Also, in light of my reading of the analysis of DuBois’s philosophy on education by Aldridge and the commentary of YARP by Fine and Cammarota, I must be keen to the problems and issues in society, including the psychological and social constructs such as racism, sexism, etc., that prevent the human race from progress. My education is the only tool through which I can ascertain these goals and work towards achieving them. The purposes of my education are to permit me to become critical and enthusiastic about learning; and a couple of the challenges to realizing these purposes are misinformation and mediocrity.

A critical lens first comes with a liberal arts education because I can use pieces from different areas of academia to help understand, analyze, and solve a problem.    My schooling, although flawed because it has trained me to view the world from a Eurocentric perspective, fulfilled its obligation of providing me with a broad-based education, which included mathematics, science, economics, literature, writing techniques, domestic and global history, understanding and application of classical and modern languages, philosophy, etc.   With this starting point, I can analyze certain texts and entities that may be partially presented or skewed.  For example, most news broadcasting mediums such as CNN or FOX have been criticized for misinforming the public about the financial crisis and negatively portraying the President’s efforts to stabilize the economy. In applying a critical lens, I roam through the Federal Trade Commission and Bureau of Economic analysis websites to read articles and skim through numbers and documents from the source before making an opinion about the administration. In order to interpret all this material, I had to rely on my education.

My education develops yearning for learning.  My schooling is only a base; the material I am tested on in the classroom is only the bare minimum.  Personally, it’s difficult to acknowledge this while going through the process because I am forced to read, understand, memorize, regurgitate, and eliminate a large volume of material.  However, a friend of mine from Columbia University Undergrad when I discussed with him the topic of this blog remarked the best, “I often feel as though they (teachers) are giving more material to better socialize at cocktail parties.” I’ve had to learn to push myself to gain knowledge of things beyond what is taught in the classroom through sharing engaging conversations with students about religion, the purpose of government, etc, reading medical journals for fun, jumping at the chance to debate intellectually with someone even if it’s about rap, and taking on academic challenges.  I think mediocrity is what prevents some students from coming to this realization. Schooling and achievement (getting into the most exclusive of schools) has trained me to do the least amount of work it takes to get an A in a class.  WE are programmed to “just do what it takes to get by” and this prevents us from understanding the purpose of education.  So I’ve learned to accept that integration by parts and declension three conjugations of Latin words may not have practical application for my career, but when I learn to see that I need to manipulate some problems before I can solve them or that learning the history of other people’s culture helps me to better appreciate who they are, then I allow my education to make me active member of society.

Jeffrey Tillus