Education

When a child opens his (or her) first puzzle and the pieces fall to the ground, it may seem very confusing. What are they to do with this pile of shapes in front of them? It often takes a parent to explain to them that all the different pieces fit together into one whole picture. Although every piece is different and unique, when they are all put into their place they form one whole picture. In the same way, teachers can teach multiculturalism in the classroom. Although every member of our society is unique, with different cultural backgrounds, we all fit together to form one unit.

As stated by Noel (1995), Understanding our own identity and the culture of our community requires knowledge and recognition of our cultures and communities and how they have shaped us (p. 267). By adding a multicultural component to their curriculums, teachers can help students see how each individual fits into the big picture. There are, however, arguments against multicultural education (Banks, 1995). For example, some critics believe that multicultural education is directed toward only minority groups, thus discriminating against middle class, white, heterosexual males.

Others believe that multiculturalism is against Western and democratic ideals. A final argument is the claim that multiculturalism will divide our presumably united nation. Although critics of multicultural education may feel they have valid arguments against the issue, I feel that the goals of multicultural education make it an important part of the curriculum that every student should experience. I agree with Wurzel (1988) and Noel (1995) when they stress awareness as a key component to multiculturalism.

Students must become aware of their own culture and how they are similar and different from others. Awareness also involves an understanding of issues involving differences in culture and a knowledge of which of these issues are present in their community. After becoming aware of these issues, students often react emotionally. With an awareness of the richness and variety of cultures in their community and a personal emotional reaction, students can take social action, another goal of multicultural education (Noel, 1995).

Noel says that students would take action aimed at positive multicultural change(p. 272). I feel that these goals are proof that the arguments against multicultural education are invalid (Banks, 1995). Multiculturalism promotes positive change for persons of all cultures. It involves not only teaching majority groups about minorities, but also teaching minority groups about the majority groups. It has its base in democratic ideals such as equality, freedom, and justice.

Multiculturalism will unite our divided nation into one unit which will have no mainstream culture, but any diverse subcultures which will cooperate for the good of everyone, not just the majority or the minority. I feel very strongly that multiculturalism should be included in all curricula. My school experience (until college) didnt include multicultural perspectives and I feel as if I missed out on some important things. I often feel a little clueless when confronted with situations involving people different from me.

Without some knowledge of our surroundings, how can we be expected to survive in society? This question reveals one of the purposes of education, survival. Learning about the other people who share our community is an essential part of this survival in modern society. Multiculturalism becomes increasingly important as our society becomes more diverse. In the past (Lynch, 1989), efforts to provide multicultural content to students have, as critics feared, created more diversity and tension among groups. However, more recent methods are aimed at creating relations based on commonalities.

Lynch (1989) suggests providing a basis of common knowledge, skills, and insights about the things that all human societies should hold in common (p. 43). Stressing similarities will unify groups with differences. Davidman (1994) defines the goals of multicultural education as: (1) educational equity; (2) empowerment of students and their parents; (3) cultural pluralism in society; (4) … understanding and harmony in the classroom, school, and community; (5) an expanded knowledge of various cultural and ethnic groups; and (6) the development of students, parents, and practitioners… ided by an informed and inquisitive multicultural perspective (p. 2).

Just as the goals stated by other crusaders for multiculturalism, Davidsons goals follow a specific order and stress knowledge, understanding, and equality. I believe that it is very necessary and completely conceivable for our education systems to move toward a multicultural curriculum. By following the goals I have mentioned, we can finally understand how the many pieces of our society fit together into one big picture.

The American educator Horace Mann once said: “As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated. ” Education is the process through which people endeavor to pass along to their children their hard-won wisdom and their aspirations for a better world. This process begins shortly after birth, as parents seek to train the infant to behave as their culture demands.

They soon, for instance, teach the child how to turn babbling sounds into language and, through example and precept, they try to instill in the child the attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge that will govern their offspring’s behavior throughout later life. Schooling, or formal education, consists of experiences that are deliberately planned and utilized to help young people learn what adults consider important for them to know and to help teach them how they should respond to choices. This education has been influenced by three important parts of modern American society: wisdom of the heart, egalitarianism, and practicality… greatest of these, practicality. In the absence of written records, no one can be sure what education man first provided for his children. Most anthropologists believe, though, that the educational practices of prehistoric times were probably like those of primitive tribes in the 20th century, such as the Australian aborigines and the Aleuts. Formal instruction was probably given just before the child’s initiation into adulthood — the puberty rite — and involved tribal customs and beliefs too complicated to be learned by direct experience.

Children learned most of the skills, duties, customs, and beliefs of the tribe through an informal apprenticeship — by taking part in such adult activities as hunting, fishing, farming, toolmaking, and cooking. In such simple tribal societies, school was not a special place… it was life itself. However, the educational process has changed over the decades, and it now vaguely represents what it was in ancient times, or even in early American society.

While the schools that the colonists established in the 17th century in the New England, Southern, and Middle colonies differed from one another, each reflected a concept of schooling that had been left behind in Europe. Most poor children learned through apprenticeship and had no formal schooling at all. Those who did go to elementary school were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Learning consisted of memorizing, which was stimulated by whipping. The first “basic textbook,” The New England Primer, was America’s own contribution to education.

Used from 1690 until the beginning of the 19th century, its purpose was to teach both religion and reading. The child learning the letter a, for example, also learned that “In Adam’s fall, We sinned all. ” As in Europe, then, the schools in the colonies were strongly influenced by religion. This was particularly true of the schools in the New England area, which had been settled by Puritans and other English religious dissenters. Like the Protestants of the Reformation, who established vernacular elementary schools in Germany in the 16th century, the Puritans sought to make education universal.

They took the first steps toward government-supported universal education in the colonies. In 1642, Puritan Massachusetts passed a law requiring that every child be taught to read. And, in 1647, it passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act,” so named because its purpose was to defeat Satan’s attempts to keep men, through an inability to read, from the knowledge of the Scriptures. The law required every town of 50 or more families to establish an elementary school and every town of 100 or more families to maintain a grammar school as well. Puritan or not, virtually all of the colonial schools had clear-cut moral purposes.

Skills and knowledge were considered important to the degree that they served religious ends and, of course, “trained” the mind. We call it “wisdom of the heart. ” These matters, by definition, are anything that the heart is convinced of… so thoroughly convinced that it over-powers the judgement of the mind. Early schools supplied the students with moral lessons, not just reading, writing and arithmetic. Obviously, the founders saw it necessary to apply these techniques, most likely “feeling” that it was necessary that the students learn these particular values.

Wisdom of the heart had a profound effect of the curriculum of the early schools. As the spirit of science, commercialism, secularism, and individualism quickened in the Western world, education in the colonies was called upon to satisfy the practical needs of seamen, merchants, artisans, and frontiersmen. The effect of these new developments on the curriculum in American schools was more immediate and widespread than its effect in European schools. Practical content was soon in competition with religious concerns.

The academy that Benjamin Franklin helped found in 1751 was the first of a growing number of secondary schools that sprang up in competition with the Latin schools. Franklin’s academy continued to offer the humanist-religious curriculum, but it also brought education closer to the needs of everyday life by teaching such courses as history, geography, merchant accounts, geometry, algebra, surveying, modern languages, navigation, and astronomy. These subjects were more practical, seeing as how industry and business were driving forces in the creation of the United States.

Religion classes could not support a family or pay the debts. By the mid-19th century this new diversification in the curriculum characterized virtually all American secondary education. America came into its own, educationally, with the movement toward state-supported, secular free schools for all children, which began in the 1820s with the common (elementary) school. The movement gained incentive in 1837 when Massachusetts established a state board of education and appointed the lawyer and politician Horace Mann (1796-1859) as its secretary.

One of Mann’s many reforms was the improvement of the quality of teaching by the establishment of the first public normal (teacher-training) schools in the United States. State after state followed Massachusetts’ example until, by the end of the 19th century, the common-school system was firmly established. It was the first rung of what was to develop into the American educational ladder. After the common school had been accepted, people began to urge that higher education, too, be tax supported.

As early as 1821, the Boston School Committee established the English Classical School (later the English High School), which was the first public secondary school in the United States. By the end of the century, such secondary schools had begun to outnumber the private academies. The original purpose of the American high school was to allow all children to extend and enrich their common-school education. With the establishment of the land-grant colleges after 1862, the high school also became a preparation for college; the step by which students who had begun at the lowest rung of the educational ladder might reach the highest.

In 1873, when the kindergarten became part of the St. Louis, Mo. school system, there was a hint that, in time, a lower rung might be added. Practicality allowed this change in the high school system. Schools now needed to ready the students for college — an even higher form of education — instead of preparing them to immediately enter the work force. America’s educational ladder was unique. Where public school systems existed in European countries such as France and Germany, they were dual systems.

When a child of the lower and middle classes finished his elementary schooling, he could go on to a vocational or technical school. The upper-class child often did not attend the elementary school but was instead tutored until he was about 9 years old and could enter a secondary school, generally a Latin grammar school. The purpose of this school was to prepare him for the university, from which he might well emerge as one of the potential leaders of his country.

Instead of two separate and distinct educational systems for separate and distinct classes, the United States provided one system open to everyone… stinctly egalitarian idea. As in mid-19th-century Europe, women were slowly gaining educational ground in the United States. “Female academies” established by such pioneers as Emma Willard (1787-1870) and Catharine Beecher (1800-78) prepared the way for secondary education for women. In 1861, Vassar, the first real college for women, was founded. Even earlier, in 1833, Oberlin College was founded as a coeducational college, and in 1837, four women began to study there. In the mid-19th century there was yet another change in education.

The secondary-school curriculum, that had been slowly expanding since the founding of the academies in the mid-18th century, virtually exploded. But the voice of practicality cried out again. A new society, complicated by the latest discoveries in the physical and biological sciences and the rise of industrialism and capitalism, called for more and newer kinds of knowledge. By 1861 as many as 73 subjects were being offered by the Massachusetts secondary schools. People still believed that the mind could be “trained,” but they now thought that science could do a better job than the classics could.

The result was a curriculum that was virtually saturated with scientific instruction. The mid-19th-century knowledge explosion also modestly affected some of the common schools, which expanded their curriculum to include such courses as science and nature study. The content of instruction in the common school, beyond which few students went, consisted of the material in a relatively small number of books: assorted arithmetic, history, and geography texts, Webster’s American Spelling Book, and two new books that appeared in 1836 the “First” and “Second” in the series of McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers.

Whereas The New England Primer admonished children against sin, the stories and poems in the readers pressed for the moral virtues. Countless children were required to memorize such admonitions as “Work while you work, play while you play. One thing each time, that is the way. ” In the early days, the common schools consisted of one room where one teacher taught pupils ranging in age from 6 to about 13 and sometimes older. The teacher instructed the children separately, not as a group. The good teacher had a strong right arm and an unshakable determination to cram information into his pupils.

Once the fight to provide free education for all children had been won, educators turned their attention to the quality of that education. To find out more about learning and the learning process, American schools looked to Europe. In the 1860s, they discovered, and for about 20 years were influenced, by Pestalozzi. His belief was that the goal of education should be the natural development of the individual child, and that educators should focus on the development of the child rather than on memorization of subject matter that he or she was unable to understand.

Pestalozzi’s school also mirrored the idea that learning begins with firsthand observation of an object and moves gradually toward the remote and abstract realm of words and ideas. The teacher’s job was to guide, not distort, the natural growth of the child by selecting his experiences and then directing those experiences toward the realm of ideas. The general effect on the common schools was to shift the emphasis from memorization of abstract facts to the firsthand observation of real objects. Pestalozzi’s diminishing influence roughly coincided with the rapid expansion of the cities.

By the 1880s the United States was absorbing several million immigrants a year, a human flood that created new problems for the common school. The question confronting educators was how to impart the largest amount of information to the greatest number of children in the shortest possible time. This new, more practical goal of educators and the means through which they attained it were reflected in the new schools they built and in the new teaching practices they adopted. Out of necessity, the one-room common school was replaced by larger schools.

To make it easier and faster for one teacher to instruct many students, there had to be as few differences between the children as possible. Since the most conspicuous difference was age, children were grouped on this basis, and each group had a separate room. To discourage physical activity that might disrupt discipline and interrupt the teaching process, to encourage close attention to and absorption of the teacher’s words, and to increase eye contact, the seats were arranged in formal rows. For good measure, they frequently were bolted to the floor.

It is not surprising, at about this time, when the goal of education was to expedite the transfer of information to a large number of students, that the normal schools began to fall under the influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). For him, education was neither the training of faculties that exist ready-made in the mind nor a natural unfolding from within. Education was instruction literally a building into the mind from the outside. The building blocks were the materials of instruction the subject matter.

The builder was the teacher. The job of the teacher was to form the child’s mind by building into it the knowledge of man’s cultural heritage through the teaching of such subjects as literature, history, science, and mathematics. Since the individual mind was presumably formed by building into it the products of the collective mind, methods of instruction were concerned wholly with how this was to be done. Herbart’s interest lay in determining how knowledge could be presented so that it would be understood and therefore retained.

He insisted that education must be based on psychological knowledge of the child so that he could be instructed effectively. The essence of his influence probably lay not so much in his carefully evolved five-step lesson plan but in the basic idea of a lesson plan. Such a plan suggested the possibility of evolving a systematic method of instruction that was the same for all pupils. Perhaps Herbart’s emphasis on the importance of motivating pupils to learn whether through presentation of the material or, failing that, through rewards and punishments also influenced the new teaching methods of the 1880s and 1890s.

The new methods, combined with the physical organization of the school, represented the direct opposite of Pestalozzi’s belief that the child’s innate powers should be allowed to develop naturally. Rather, the child must be lopped off or stretched to fit the procrustean curriculum. Subjects were graded according to difficulty, assigned to certain years, and taught by a rigid daily timetable. The amount of information that the child had absorbed through drill and memorization was determined by how much could be extracted from him by examinations. Reward or punishment came in the form of grades.

At the end of the 19th century the methods of presenting information had thus been streamlined. The curriculum had been enlarged and brought closer to the concerns of everyday life. Book learning had been supplemented somewhat by direct observation. And psychological whipping in the form of grades had perhaps diminished any physical whipping. In one respect, however, the schools of the late 19th century were no different from those, say, of the Middle Ages: they were still based on who adults thought children were or should be, not who they really were.

Before the 20th century, the ideas of such men as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and, in the United States, Francis W. Parker (1837-1902) had caused little more than rumblings beneath the floor of the traditional schoolhouse. Because of John Dewey (1859-1952), they gathered force, and in the 1920s and 1930s new and old ideas collided right in the middle of the classroom. Some of the schools, where neat rows of subdued children had sat immobilized in their bolted-down seats listening to a teacher armed with textbook, lesson plan, grade book, and disciplinary ruler, became buzzing places where virtually everything moved, including the chairs.

The children were occupied in groups or worked by themselves, depending on what they were doing. Above all, they were always doing: reading a favorite book, writing, painting, or learning botany by tending, observing, and discussing the plants they were growing. The teacher moved around the room, asking and answering questions, giving a child the spelling of a word he wanted to write or the pronunciation of a word he wanted to read, and in general acting as a helpful guide for the children’s chosen activities. The chattering and noise and activity were signs that the children were excited about and absorbed by what they were doing.

They were, in fact, learning by doing. Dewey maintained that the child is not born with a ready-made faculty called thinking, which needs the exercise of repeated drill to make it as strong as the adult faculty. Nor, he said, is the mind a blank tablet on which knowledge is impressed. Mind thinking or intelligence is, according to Dewey, a developing, growing thing. And the early stages of growth and of knowledge are different from the later stages. The development of the mind begins with the child’s perception of things and facts as they are related to himself, to his personal, immediate world.

A dog is his dog or his neighbor’s dog; it is something furry and warm, something to hug, feed, and play with. The child may recognize the fact that though his neighbor’s dog looks different from his, they are both dogs. When he sees a wolf at the zoo, he may decide that his dog is a nicer and friendlier animal than the wolf. The child’s zoological knowledge is thus organized around his own experiences with particular animals and his perceptions of similarities and differences between those experiences; it is psychologically organized knowledge.

The last step in the growth of intelligence is the ability to organize facts logically, that is, in terms of their relationship to one another. The formulated, logically organized knowledge of the zoologist is that both the wolf and the domesticated dogs belong to the family Canidae, order Carnivora; that the dogs belong to the genus Canis and species familiaris; and that one dog belongs to the sporting breed spaniel, the other to the working breed collie. Presented to the child in this form, however, the study of zoology has no relation to the animals he plays with, feeds, and observes.

His own experience outside of school does not bring the information to life, and the information does not enrich and extend his own experience. It represents another world entirely a world of empty words. All he can do, therefore, is memorize what he reads and is told. He is not developing the power to think. To stimulate the growth of intelligence rather than stifle it, as Dewey saw it, education must begin not at the end but at the beginning of the growth process; that is, with activity that engages the whole child mentally, socially, physically, and emotionally.

In the school, as in his extra-curricular activities, it is the process of doing something that has meaning for the child handling, making, growing, observing. The purpose of the school, however, is not to re-create an environment of relatively random activity but to create an environment where activities are carefully chosen to promote the development of intelligence. Carefully selected and guided, they become nets for gathering and retaining knowledge.

Instead of presenting children with an already packaged study of elementary science, Dewey might well have recommended that they study life in an aquarium. The child’s natural curiosity should lead to such questions as, “Why does the fish move his mouth like that? Is he always drinking? ” His search for the answer will lead his intelligence in the same direction as that taken by the scientist the direction of formulated conclusions based on observation of the phenomenon.

He will be learning the method as well as the subject matter of science; learning to think as a scientist does. Moreover, the inquiry process need not be confined to one narrow area of knowledge but can be guided naturally by the teacher into investigations of fishing and then, conceivably (depending on the maturity of the young learner), of the role of the sea in the life of man. The barriers between “subjects” thus break down as the child’s curiosity impels him to draw upon information from all areas of human knowledge.

Books, films, recordings, and other such tools serve this end. Learning the skills reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic can be made meaningful to the child more easily if he is not forced through purposeless mechanical exercises, which, he is told, are important as a preparation for activities in later life. He should be led to discover that in order to do something he recognizes to be important right now, he needs certain skills. If he wants to write a letter, he must know how to spell; if he wants to make a belt, he must know how to measure the leather correctly.

Of course, Dewey was not suggesting that in order to learn an individual must restate the whole history of the human race through personal inquiry. While the need for a background of direct experiences is great in elementary school, as children get older they should become increasingly able to carry out intellectual investigations without having to depend upon direct experiences. The principle of experiencing does apply, however, to the elementary phase of all subjects even when the learner is a high-school or college student or an adult.

The purpose is to encourage in the learner a habitual attitude of establishing connections between the everyday life of human beings and the materials of formal instruction in a way that has meaning and application. The measuring and comparative grading of a student’s assumed abilities, processes that reflect the educator’s desire to assess the “results” of schooling, are incompatible with Dewey’s thinking. The quantity of what is acquired does not in itself have anything to do with the development of mind. The “quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers,” he wrote, “is the measure of educative growth.

Because it is a process, learning is cumulative, and cannot be forced or rushed. For Dewey, the educative growth of the individual assures the healthy growth of a society. A society grows only by changes brought about by free individuals with independent intelligence and resourcefulness. The beginning of a better society, then, lies in the creation of better schools. At about the same time that a few pioneering schools of the 1920s were trying to put Dewey’s theories into practice, the “testing” movement, which started in about 1910, was working up steam.

The child had first become the object of methodical scientific research in 1897, when experiments conducted by Joseph M. Rice suggested that drill in spelling did not produce effective results. By 1913 Edward L. Thorndike had concluded that learning was the establishment of connections between a stimulus and a response and that the theory of mental faculties was nonsense. Alfred Binet, in 1905, published the first scale for measuring intelligence. During the 1920s, children began to be given IQ (intelligence quotient) and achievement tests on a wide scale and sometimes were carefully grouped by ability and intelligence.

Many of the spelling and reading books they used, foreshadowing the 1931 Dick and Jane readers, were based on “controlled” vocabularies. After the shock Americans felt when the Soviets launched the first space satellite (Sputnik) in 1957, criticism of the schools swelled into loud demands for renewed emphasis on content mastery. The insistence on cognitive “performance” and “excellence” accomplished four things. It increased competitive academic pressures on students at all levels.

It stimulated serious and sustained interest in preschool education, which manifested itself in various ways from the revival of the Montessori method in the 1960s to the preschool television series Sesame Street in 1969. In addition, it created a new interest in testing, this time in such forms as national assessments of student performance, experiments with programmed materials, and attempts to gauge when children could begin to read. And it stimulated interest in the application of technology and instructional systems to education as a means of improving student instruction. It was practical to open up new avenues of education… United States was in competition with the Soviet Union.

The Space Race was well on its way and America needed to change the way they learned. And practicality was the key. From the 18th century onward, as knowledge of the world increased, new subjects had been added and old ones split up into branches. Later, new combinations of courses resulted from the attempt to put the scattered pieces of knowledge back together again. The purpose was to make knowledge more rational and meaningful so that it could be understood instead of mechanically memorized. It also encouraged young learners to begin to think and inquire as scholars do.

In other words, many of the new programs developed for use in the schools, particularly in the 1960s, stressed the inquiry approach as a means of mastering a body of knowledge and of creating a desire for more knowledge. Resistance to the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision terminating segregation placed the schools in the middle of a bitter and sometimes violent dispute over which children were going to attend what schools. By 1965, when a measure of genuine integration had become a reality in many school districts, the schools again found themselves in the eye of a stormy controversy.

This time the question was not which children were going to what schools but what kind of education society should provide for the students. The goal of high academic performance, which had been revived by criticisms and reforms of the 1950s and early 1960s, began to be challenged by demands for more “humane,” “relevant,” and “pressure-free” schooling. Many university and some high-school students from all ethnic groups and classes had been growing more and more frustrated — some of them desperately so — over what they felt was a cruel and senseless war in Vietnam and a cruel, discriminatory, competitive, loveless society at home.

They demanded curriculum reform, improved teaching methods, and greater stress and action on such problems as overpopulation, pollution, international strife, deadly weaponry, and discrimination. Pressure for reform came not only from students but also from many educators. While students and educators alike spoke of the need for greater “relevance” in what was taught, opinions as to what was relevant varied greatly.

The blacks wanted new textbooks in which their people were recognized and fairly represented, and some of them wanted courses in black studies. They, and many white educators, also objected to culturally biased intelligence and aptitude tests and to academic college entrance standards and examinations. Such tests, they said, did not take into account the diverse backgrounds of students who belonged to ethnic minorities and whose culture was therefore different from that of the white middle-class student.

Whites and blacks alike also wanted a curriculum that touched more closely on contemporary social problems and teaching methods that recognized their existence as individual human beings rather than as faceless robots competing for grades. Alarmed by the helplessness and hopelessness of the urban ghetto schools, educators began to insist on curricula and teaching methods flexible enough to provide for differences in students’ social and ethnic backgrounds. In this way, egalitarianism entered into the education system.

Rather than keeping whites and blacks segregated in the schools, egalitarianists provided a way for the two groups to co-exist equally. In this case, the standards were raised instead of lowered in order to promote this new equality. Previously, whites and blacks studied on very different levels. Unfortunately, blacks were not given the same opportunities as whites were… and they did not receive the attention needed to improve the environment in which they studied.

Things changed, however, when egalitarianists raised the standards to promote equality. Clearly, the American education system has changed drastically over the years. From one-room schoolhouses to acres of college campus… from Pestalozzi to Dewey… from simple religious studies to graduate programs, education has been influenced by many different factors, such as egalitarianism, wisdom of the heart, and most importantly, practicality. “Necessity is the mother of invention”, they say… Just as practicality is the mother of educational reform.

English only–sink or swim? Yeah right! Instead of English Only Advocates worrying about bilingual education cost in our school system, why not take advantage of the skills our ethnic minorities possess to move our economy forward? They are obviously not thinking clearly, because the benefit of bilinguals, significantly outweigh the bad. To deny our youth the opportunity for upward mobility and skill to become more marketable in a worldwide capacity is inhumane. They believe bilinguals threaten to sap our sense of national identity and divide us along ethnic lines.

They also fear that any government recognition of minority languages sends the wrong message to immigrants, encouraging them to believe they can live in the U. S. A. without learning English or conforming to The American way. That is an overt, racist, and paranoid view, dont you think? The most significant issues that support bilingual education for students ability to assimilate in the mainstream culture are, the development of students linguistic resources and preserve their cultural heritage, contributions to the American economy, and diversity.

The development of a students language and preservation of their culture is essential for the upward mobility of todays youth. There always have been some immigrants who viewed themselves explicitly as the preserver and savior of their languages and heritages. Since the late 1800s, ethnic minorities in America have been consistently characterized as culturally inferior. Their language right has consistently been the subject of political review. Politicians do not have (PCC(SW) Taylor/16603/Mr. Jones/Small Group 2/23 Feb 00 the right to force people to master their language and values just because they are the dominant society.

They should encourage and support students to the attainment of bilingual or multilingual skills. They should also consider that students coming from homes where two or more languages are used will face difficulty in applying while in the school environment. The fact that so few Americans command any other language than English is largely a result of educational failure and cultural inadequacies. The American economy will benefit from bilingual education because historically multilingual personnel are smarter, academic skills are sharper, and their contributions to society are immeasurable.

English is the one language that offers the biggest market, the largest pool of talent, and the greatest probability of being able to communicate with anyone on the planet. Bilingual education is a tool for better education that children whose primary language is not English learn more easily. Industry and Information Technology dance to English lyrics. Students will have no future in the Information Technology field if they cannot command English as an effective medium of communication. Furthermore, good bilingual programs are about more than learning a language.

They should be based on a respect for diversity and multiculturalism, and parents and community must be essential partners. (Rethinking schools Vol 1. 13, #2. ). Over 80% of todays Internet WEB pages, databases and other enhancing computer programs are in English. It is in the best interest of all countries to ensure their children are bilingual and computer literate. Diversity in todays society is essential to the success of this nation. The lack of bilingual personnel has most recently created major problems for U. S. security agencies.

Specifically, Of the more than 500,000 American troops deployed to the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, the Department of Defense was able to identify just 45 U. S. military personnel with any Iraqi language backgrounds, and only 5 of these were trained in intelligence operations (James Crawfords homepage). The statement above is a perfect example of why it is important to possess the ability to read, write and speak in foreign languages. Those who oppose such diversity really must take timeout to reevaluate their philosophy.

Their views are closed minded, stupid, and most importantly serve to cripple this nations ability to remain a super power. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that multilingual personnel are generally smarter than those who only speak one language. They possess the intelligence to mix in a wide variety of cultures and share their experience with America. So I say again, why not support bilingual education? Bilingual education gives jobs and local power to members of the non-English speaking community. It also reinforces childrens identification with members of their own ethnic group.

The abilities of multilingual personnel should be exploited at all costs. I personally favor maintenance and enrichment of bilingual education. Unfortunately, the opposition of bilingualism has a great influence to change the political viewpoint. Overall we discussed the development of students linguistic resources and preserve their cultural heritage, contributions to the American economy, and diversity. As Equal Opportunity Advisors, we must exhaust every effort to ensure our students regardless of ethnicity are afforded the opportunity to explore preserve their cultural heritage.

Additionally we must push bilingualism to assimilate ethnic minority personnel into the mainstream of society. In other words, it would not impose a substantial benefit on a child to learn subject matter in two languages? No matter what the theoretical conclusions may be on bilingual education, ethnic minorities should be individually consulted and have the final word in deciding for themselves. They should be afforded the opportunity to judge for themselves, if it is in their best interest and the future to take advantage of the possibility of bilingual education for their children.

Since the early 1980’s, the issue of America’s faltering public school system has become a serious concern. The crisis in K-12 education is one of the biggest challenges facing the nation. There is a great deal of evidence to show this problem. The pathetically low results of American students through international test scores is one obvious fault. Another is the failure of many students to demonstrate their knowledge of basic skills and literacy. It is surprising that such a long time has passed without any sufficient effort put forth to correct the problem.

Even more surprising, is the fact that some deny that such a problem exists. The failure of the nation to adequately educate the students of America has an endless list of negative effects. With the lack of proper education, generations of kids are growing up without the basic, essential knowledge to be able to compete in the workplace. As a result of this, the U. S. stands a chance in losing its superpower reign of the world. Therefore, it is not only a social concern, but also a major economical issue. Another alarming concern is the high rate of student dropouts.

Now, nstead of all students receiving a poor education, some are not getting one at all. The main cause for this is the students’lack of interest in school. So much of the teaching that goes on today is based on rote and memorization. Not all learning can be exciting, and sometimes memorizing things is necessary. Although teachers should find other ways of getting the information to the students. When students are taught like this, they get bored and tired of school, and this is why they dropout. Obvoiusly, if they drop out of school, they probably aren’t going to earn there degree.

However, if more kids do earn heir high school degrees, the country would have less unemployment. More people in the workplace then leads to a stronger and more stable economy. If our society could find a way to keep more kids in school, our country would prosper, and the educational system on a whole, would be much better. Inner-city inequality produces a great deal of problems in all aspects of life. One way it shows up continuously is in education. Although many people realize this problem, nothing is being done to improve it. Statistics show that wealthy school districts offer much better opportunities for their tudents.

This increases the gap in the social status of America by educating the wealthy and leaving the others with the low paying jobs. This could quite possibly wipe out the entire middle class, leaving a huge gap between the upper and lower classes. While we accept inequality as a problem, we have not yet acted upon it seriously enough. Until some serious action is taken, and poorer schools are offered better oppourtunities, the education in America has no chance at becoming better. Of course with such a highly diverse population, all people are not going to agree with each other.

Those people that do not acknowledge the nation’s educational program to be defective must have their own reasons for believing what they do. They might bring up the fact that the educational system has been good enough to make the nation the most powerful country in the world. Therefore, why change something that has produced such excellent results? What they fail to realize, though, is that the other first world countries are constantly trying to catch up with the U. S. So we must take precautions, constantly improve the education, and not take our power for ranted.

Everything we live for was not just handed to us. Our forefathers worked extremely hard to put us where we are today. The world is always evolving and advancing technologically. Therefore, our generations of America must also work hard to keep up with the advances. Unfortunately, we have slipped behind in the area of education. Although we will not find a simple solution to our faulty educational system, something has to be done. What better place to start then accepting the fact that it is the biggest challenge facing the nation today?

The whole issue of teacher certification is one of great importance and when discussed must be done in a delicate and thoughtful manner. The reason for this increasing importance is because the education of our nations teachers is important to the creation of an ideal education system, which is one of the goals of our national government and State governments. Over the years the whole educational reform movement has become an increasingly “hot” topic. Reforms in the administration of school systems and in curriculum theory and practice have been asked for and a4re currently being put into effect.

Recently, reform of the education of teachers is being added to the lo9ng list of reforms needed. Many reform activists feel that direct changes need to be made on the methods of training and certifying the teachers of our country. Before looking at the reform movement, however, one must first look at the so called problem of inconsistency in teacher certification. In our country today there is a general consistency among the requirements for state certification of teachers. Most states require their teacher institutions to establish a teacher education program that includes coursework and fieldwork.

The coursework includes those courses that prepare a student to become a professional teacher and those classes that include major and minor fields of specialization. Fieldwork, which is probably the most important of the two forms of requirements, involves the individual interested in being a teacher going out and observing, practicing, and preparing to enter the educational world as an instructor. There is no argument that all schools in every state has these basic requirements of teacher certification.

However, the inconsistency lies within how the numerous institutions go about in teaching these requirements. Each post-secondary school is given the jurisdiction to choose how they are going to go about meeting these basic teacher certification requirements. For example, many states require a different amount of field hours. An inconsistency can also be seen in the various models of teacher education that are used throughout the nation. Two education researchers, Howey and Zimpher conducted a study on this variety of models in 1989. They came up with three different attempts of teacher training.

The first, known as the teachers college model, involves certification students entering a separate school within a university that is a “teachers college”. The second approach is called the liberal arts model by the researchers, and is a method that requires and individual to become specialized in a certain liberal arts subject in order to create “capable and cultured human beings”. The third and final model discussed by Howley and Zimpher is entitled the competency-based model. This method trains individuals in the arts o motivation and understanding.

As one can see by this case study, there have been a variety of approaches to teacher certification. An inconsistency can similarly be detected by looking at the various new and innovative ideas in teacher education. Among these include the alternative route, a topic discussed earlier, and the five-year degree program, and issue to be discussed shortly in this section. Altogether, one could state that there is some inconsistency in teacher certification, and this inconsistency brings about a small problem in the educational spectrum of our world. In my opinion, there is no national and universal set of requirements for teacher certification.

The variety of different methods and forms of teacher education programs is causing an inconsistency in how teachers are being trained nationwide. When this is realized, the whole issue of reforming teacher certification becomes very relevant to our society. As stated earlier, reforms in the training of future teachers are beginning to really be requested by the general public. Various groups have met to discuss the various issues surrounding the reform movement. Among the most notable are the Holmes Group, the Association of American Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), the Education Commission of the States (ECS), and Goodlads group.

These various groups and many others have come up with a variety of reforms and new standards that most likely should and will be integrated into the current teacher certification requirements. One certain similarity that all of these recommendations have with each other is that they all call for higher regulations and an increase in the education of future teachers. Many of the group0s called for an increase in providing individuals knowledge on the profession of teachi8ng, and some groups also called for a more intense training in the various fields under a liberal arts education.

Increases in the amount of fieldwork required seems to also be a major issue discussed by the reform groups. The issue of selection under standardized testing was also discussed, with respect to increasing the required SAT/ACT or GRE scores. Finally, the research groups came up with various new ideas involving the creation of professional teaching schools or tiered systems that would require a teacher to go through more training even after they received their bachelors degree. All in all, these reform groups have come up with some very unique and interesting ideas to change teacher certification for the better.

It is the best interest of our nation to make changes in our current teacher education program, for, in this case, change would be for the better. To conclude, I would like to take a brief but in depth look at an innovative idea established by the Maine State Department of Education in conjunction with the University of Southern Maine. This program, entitled the Extended Teacher Education Program, involves future teachers continuing on for a fifth year after completing their undergraduate studies. This fifth year involves the individual taking part in internships.

These internships give the future teachers a chance at more fieldwork in order to gain more experiences before they become full fledged teachers. Nonetheless, the results of the initial year of the program seem to indicate that the idea around this new program is a successful one. Those individuals who took part in the program obtained various skills and understandings that all ideal teachers should have. The excellent outcomes of this program leads one to believe that it might be a good idea to implement this structure nationwide. The idea of creating professional schools for teachers has become a popular one in recent times.

After all if doctors and lawyers have to go to a professional school, then shouldnt teachers as well? In conclusion, the issue of teacher training and certification brings up many questions, especially in reference to reforming. The inconsistent and somewhat outdated education of teachers today needs change, in order to create an ideal educational system. Numerous reforms have been discussed and recommended by various research organizations and now is the time to take action and implement some of these reforms before our education systems continue to fall downwards into the depths of degradation. Change I needed and change must come now.

When a child opens his (or her) first puzzle and the pieces fall to the ground, it may seem very confusing. What are they to do with this pile of shapes in front of them? It often takes a parent to explain to them that all the different pieces fit together into one whole picture. Although every piece is different and unique, when they are all put into their place they form one whole picture. In the same way, teachers can teach multiculturalism in the classroom. Although every member of our society is unique, with different cultural backgrounds, we all fit together to form one unit.

As stated by Noel 1995), Understanding our own identity and the culture of our community requires knowledge and recognition of our cultures and communities and how they have shaped us (p. 267). By adding a multicultural component to their curriculums, teachers can help students see how each individual fits into the big picture. There are, however, arguments against multicultural education (Banks, 1995). For example, some critics believe that multicultural education is directed toward only minority groups, thus discriminating against middle class, white, heterosexual males.

Others believe that multiculturalism is against Western and democratic ideals. A final argument is the claim that multiculturalism will divide our presumably united nation. Although critics of multicultural education may feel they have valid arguments against the issue, I feel that the goals of multicultural education make it an important part of the curriculum that every student should experience. I agree with Wurzel (1988) and Noel (1995) when they stress awareness as a key component to multiculturalism.

Students must become aware of their own culture and how they are similar and different from others. Awareness also involves an understanding of issues involving differences in culture and a nowledge of which of these issues are present in their community. After becoming aware of these issues, students often react emotionally. With an awareness of the richness and variety of cultures in their community and a personal emotional reaction, students can take social action, another goal of multicultural education (Noel, 1995).

Noel says that students would take action aimed at positive multicultural change(p. 272). I feel that these goals are proof that the arguments against multicultural education are invalid (Banks, 1995). Multiculturalism promotes positive change for persons of all cultures. It involves not only teaching majority groups about minorities, but also teaching minority groups about the majority groups. It has its base in democratic ideals such as equality, freedom, and justice.

Multiculturalism will unite our divided nation into one unit which will have no mainstream culture, but many diverse subcultures which will cooperate for the good of everyone, not just the majority or the minority. I feel very strongly that multiculturalism should be included in all curricula. My school experience (until college) didn’t include multicultural perspectives and I feel as if I missed out on some important things. I often feel a little clueless when confronted with situations involving people different from me.

Without some knowledge of our surroundings, how can we be expected to survive in society? This question reveals one of the purposes of education, survival. Learning about the other people who share our community is an essential part of this survival in modern society. Multiculturalism becomes increasingly important as our society becomes more diverse. In the past (Lynch, 1989), efforts to provide multicultural content to students have, as critics feared, created more diversity and tension among groups. However, more recent methods are aimed at creating relations based on commonalities.

Lynch (1989) suggests providing a basis of common knowledge, skills, and insights about the things that all human societies should hold in common (p. 43). Stressing similarities will unify groups with differences. Davidman (1994) defines the goals of multicultural education as: (1) educational equity; (2) empowerment of students and their parents; (3) cultural pluralism in society; (4) … understanding and harmony in the classroom, school, and community; (5) an expanded knowledge of various cultural and ethnic roups; and (6) the development of students, parents, and practitioners… uided by an informed and inquisitive multicultural perspective (p. 2).

Just as the goals stated by other crusaders for multiculturalism, Davidson’s goals follow a specific order and stress knowledge, understanding, and equality. I believe that it is very necessary and completely conceivable for our education systems to move toward a multicultural curriculum. By following the goals I have mentioned, we can finally understand how the many pieces of our society fit together into one big picture.

Hazing in universities across the nation has become an increasingly dangerous ritual that is seemingly becoming more difficult to put an end to due to its development into an underground activity. Though a regular activity in the seventies, hazing, a possible dangerous act of initiation to a group, has now become an activity that is banned in thirty-nine states (Wagner 16). However, this ritual has not been stopped or become less severe. In fact it is becoming more dangerous.

Since it has been banned, with many colleges imposing their own penalties against those participating in it, many fraternities and sororities have pursued this activity in an underground fashion. Since these groups have gone underground, some victims of these rituals have been injured and subsequently died. This is due to the hazers not seeking medical treatment for the victims, for fear that they may be fined or charged by police or campus authorities. One estimate states that at least sixty-five students have died between the years of 1978 and 1996 from beatings and stress inflicted during fraternity initiation rites (Greek 26).

Hazing has been defined in the Pennsylvania Hazing Law as any action or situation which recklessly or intentionally endangers the mental or physical safety of a student or which destroys or removes public or private property for the purpose of initiation or admission into or affiliation with, or as a condition for continued membership in, any organization operating under the sanction of or recognized as an organization by an institution of higher education.

The term shall include, but not be limited to, any brutality of a physical nature, such as whipping, beating, branding, forced calisthenics, exposure to the elements, forced consumption of any food, liquor, drug, or other substance, or any forced physical activity which could adversely affect the physical health and safety of the individual, and shall include any activity which would subject the individual to extreme mental stress, such as sleep deprivation, forced exclusion from social contact, forced conduct which could result in extreme embarrassment, or any other forced activity which could adversely affect the mental health or dignity of the individual(Pennsylvania Hazing Law 1).

The importance of this hazing situation is the fact that people are being injured, both physically and mentally, causing death or lifelong trauma. Though it may seem like an easy to control situation, the truth is that it is not easy at all. The only times that these groups, who subject individuals to hazing activities, are caught or penalized is after the damage done to an individual is so horrible as to result in death or hospitalization. The act of hazing may consist of something as subtle as a pledge, one who is trying to become a part of the group, having to answer phones at a fraternity house to extreme hazing such as being severely beat with paddles or even bricks. Since hazing takes many forms, it is hard for the public to realize that these pledges are actually being harmed.

It is especially hard to see the mental abuse aspect of this situation. At times, pledges may be forced to wear humiliating items such as dog collars or diapers. It may look like an innocent prank, and may actually seem humorous, but stunts like this can deeply affect a person emotionally (Scleifer 42). Hazers in Greek societies have also been known to play the buzz-saw game in which a chainsaw is held inches away from a pledge until he/she screams in terror. This practice is used to instill respect, in the form of extreme fear, into the pledges (The Persistent Madness of Greek Hazing 14). Physical hazing, however, is where the most life threatening problems are occurring.

With groups such as Omega Psi Phi of the University of Florida, who whacked its inductees in the heads with boards, beat them with fists, and hit them with bricks, one can only expect catastrophic results. For example, in 1993, the members of Omega Psi Phi beat Joseph J. Snell, a junior at the University of Maryland with such objects as a hammer, a horsehair whip, a broken chair leg, and a brush. Later, Snell was forced to place a space heater next to his face because the group said that his skin was not black enough. Snell was hospitalized due to the incident. He remained scared and despondent after his release. He had even called a suicide hotline because of the mental anguish that was caused (Former Student Wins $375,000 23).

The hurt and confusion of a victim of mental and physical hazing can remain for years after the abuse. Yet, even after all the abuse, members of these organizations continue to feel that because they had to suffer through this act of initiation to get into the group, their successors must also be fall subject to these activities. Naturally, people want and need to be accepted. This is why an individual will go along with the hazing activities. Valerie Eastman, a behavioral science professor at Drury College in Springfield, MO, states You know youre a reasonable person and you just went through this nasty, unpleasant ritual, so you think the group must have been worth it. You try to justify it (Wagner 16).

Though some members in a fraternity or sorority may be against what is happening to these individuals, the codes of secrecy and brotherhood/sisterhood are so strong that they fear to break them and come forward to report these acts (Ruffins 18). Lydia Bradley, a strong advocate of anti-hazing laws and national speaker for placement of these laws, has interviewed students about the act of hazing in college. She reports, Im told that hazing unifies a group, that it is a rite-of-passage, that it builds brotherhood, that it is a tradition, or, the worst reason of all, that I went through it(Bradley 1). It is this type of attitude that hinders the expulsion of the hazing activities. We, as the public, are limited, both in our knowledge of what truly happens in these groups and the ability to stop it, by not personally becoming a member of them.

Though some of the fraternities that have been suspended for acting against these anti-hazing laws, they continue to operate underground and make no effort to change their behavior according to Stocktons Director of Student Development, Tom ODonnell (Kempert 12). As of yet, there are virtually no associations that actively monitor the actions of fraternities and sororities. They are trusted to act in a responsible manner. As stated in Hank Nuwers Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, What possibly could be expected from a group of adolescents when you leave them alone to govern their own activities (Nuwer 34). One may parallel these activities to those expressed in William Goldings Lord of the Flies to what may happen when such adolescents are left unsupervised to run a members-only organization.

National Fraternities and sororities have neglected their parental responsibilities and have left pledging up to these adolescents. It is important that these actions are stopped by any reasonable means necessary. Since hazing has been a process that virtually all these members had been subject to, they will be reluctant to change. The idea of hazing has been placed in their heads as a test to foster unity, to instill a sense of membership, to promote scholarship, and to build awareness of the specific chapters history (Chenowith 20). Therefor, an alternative must be able to instill these exact qualities. Believers in the supposed benefits of hazing may be more likely to change their opinion if they can envision some alternatives.

In many cases, those who are most vocal against eliminating hazing are those who are bitter and angry about the hazing that they themselves endured, but dont want to eliminate this publicly. They expect others should be abused in order to gain true membership in the group. In this case, specific programs should be established to teach the devastating effects of hazing. A new sanction reduction policy has been established at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey to tackle some of the problems. The fraternities at this college that have been sanctioned for committing violations are now able to participate in a program that will possibly reduce their sanctions.

This OPTIONS program offers students to take one of two four-credit elective courses: The Psychology of Well Being, which explores principles of physical and mental health, or Alcohol 101, which teachers the dangerous effects of alcohol, especially those involved in college situations. Along with this, they had established a Greek self-study committee, through which a Greek Council was formed (Kempert 12).

This will educate students about the dangers they are placing on the pledges and change their ways while offering them the incentive of lowered sanctions at the same time. Incentives seem to be the best way to reach these organizations and hopefully it will subject them to the knowledge of what their actions may cause others. An alternative replacement to hazing activities would be another way to eliminate this problem. They could foster their unity in ways such as involving the whole group in a community charity.

By asking the pledges to involve themselves in charities, or present the group with specific ideas for charitable work, would show the pledges sense of commitment to the group, along with helping to show the public the goodness that can become of these groups (Crothers 50). Instead of making the pledges do chores or excessive exercise, why not promote scholarship by designating study hours.

What better way to prove an organizations worthiness but by setting an example scholastically. These fraternities or sororities could invite leaders of the national groups or advisors to speak at a meeting instead of forcing these pledges to incessantly recite names or worthless facts about the group they are pledging to. Many alternatives are out there; one just has to have the strength to bring it to mention. Of course other solutions such as the undercover spies have been thought of.

But, this would only seem to tear the organization apart and make them more careful in whom the choose as pledges, make them more dangerous and secretive in their activities, and less likely to help someone once they have been injured for fear of getting caught. A combination of incentives, alternatives, and a council to create a forum to discuss these alternatives to the hazing process is the most reasonable solution to this problem. Using otherwise sneaky tactics could only increase the problem and drive it further underground. As stated before, it can be hard to talk members into changes this tradition of the organization, but through time and education they will see its benefits. By performing such alternatives as previously mentioned, the dangerous hazing process will be eliminated and the good-side of these groups will become evident.

Working together on a project, such as one that will help the local community, will bring a sense of accomplishments to the members and a sense of pride to both the community and the institution (Kempert 12). Of course the only way these solutions could come into effect is if the organizations and the institution work together. The school has to realize tha. t, even if there has been no public incidences regarding hazing in their school, hazing probably does exist. It is this thought that should cause them to form some sort of incentive program of their own to counteract it. However, the members also have to take responsibility and go to the school for help in organizing the possible incentives and alternatives.

Throughout the span of the past few weeks I have traversed the globe, visiting several countries and regions, only to realize that although new methods develop, language as a way of expressing ones self has remained the most effective. Despite this fact, language still has its pitfalls. Neil Postman, in his essay “Defending Against the Indefensible,” outlines seven concepts that can be used to aid a student in better understanding the language as a means of communication. He describes how modern teaching methods leave a student vulnerable to the “prejudices of their elders”, further stating that a good teacher must always be skeptical.

He urges teachers of all subjects to break free from traditional teachings as well as “linguistical tyranny” His first principle regards the process of definition. As I sit in an every day classroom I notice several things. Many, if not all student simply nod their heads while a teacher explains, be it a theory in Math, or a formula in Science. Not once have I encountered a student willing to raise their hand and question the definition, or meaning that a teacher has rambled off to them. Neil Postman states his feelings on this best when he writes, ” It is a form of stupidity when to accept without reflection someone elses definition.

He wants people to realize that definitions are not god given, and that to question the validity is acceptable. Upon looking in a dictionary at any word you will see that all have several meanings. The same may apply to our lives, while one definition may apply to you another may not. The ability to question a definition is a crucial part of communication. For example: in the practice of law a case might call for someone to define the freedom of press, and that very definition may mean two completely different things to two different people.

Postmans first principle was one that I feel needed to be addressed. Too often our teachers impose the same definition they learned, valid, or not. If one is not allowed to defend a definition, especially an unjust one, then communication becomes more difficult. “All the knowledge one could ever attain is by asking questions, so logically these questions should be properly formed. ” Postmans second principle involves the skill of question asking. Simply put, this means that the answer we get depends on the question we ask. How you phrase a question makes all the difference in the world.

A query asked in two separate ways can result in two completely different answers. “A question is the most important tool we have” states Postman. Take scientists for example. Their entire career is based on asking questions, stating a hypothesis, and furthermore, answering them by conducting experiments. Postman calls for the art of question asking to be infused with the current school curriculum, because to often students do not ask questions. When a student arrives at school on the first day they often notice many changes.

Although welcome, these changes sometimes make a student wonder why he or she was not asked if they….. would prefer them. This is the perfect example of how one phrases a question wrong. Although a student might voice their opinion by saying, “I would like a better school” they dont imply in which way they would like to achieve that. Although it was a noteworthy concept, I found it to have many flaws. Postman believes that this concept be put on high priority. He never examines how teachers are to teach this radical way of thinking.

There are other factors in a students high school career, and his ideas are not the only ones that need to be considered. Yet again I find that Postmans third concept is not in my favor either. He says that words previously thought simple to us, such as good, bad, and true, may be completely ignored by the common student. This is due to the fact that words like this have become commonplace causing a student to simply glaze over them. He asks that if vocabulary tests remain, then at least test a student on simple words.

Postman argues that if a student were to see hidden meaning in a word, then they could use it to their defense. It is my belief that Postman may be correct now, what about in the future. If attention were turned to smaller words, then surely our vocabulary will diminish, and the same thing that happened to words such as true, and false, will happen to words such as semantic, and pedagogical. Vocabulary tests should be left as they are. If a student wishes to study words of everyday use, read a book, or watch television.

The next principle was thought provoking as well. The use of a metaphor as a tool in education is rarely used, as Postman notes. “Unless our students are aware of how metaphors shape arguments, organize perceptions, and control feelings, their understanding is severely limited. Postman displays how most political speeches are laced with metaphors, and how teachers methods are shaped by a metaphor. A student who doesnt understand a metaphor, or when it is being applied tends to have a more closed outlook.

A metaphor, used as a communication skill, is best described in a political way. Think of Reagans Voodoo economics, or Bill Clinton building a bridge to the 21st century. Politicians can easily scam an ignorant voter, should one not understand a metaphor. For example: Clinton refers to building a bridge, but does not tell us with which tools he intends to build it with. This particular concept is valid alone for the above reason. Whether you are talking to a teacher or watching television, metaphors need to understand. The fifth concept is that of reification.

This means confusing words with things. We falsely associate simple words with things they dont even resemble. This occurs many times when we communicate. Sometimes used to exaggerate the importance of a detail when telling a story, or trying to increase the appeal of consumer goods. Postman wants reification to be taught in school so students may see the inner workings of it. Reification is a very potent thing in every day life, and the study of reification in school is an admirable thing. Students should be made wary of advertising gimmicks.

The American educator Horace Mann once said: “As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated. ” Education is the process through which people endeavor to pass along to their children their hard-won wisdom and their aspirations for a better world. This process begins shortly after birth, as parents seek to train the infant to behave as their culture demands.

They soon, for instance, teach the child how to turn babbling sounds into language and, through example and precept, they try to instill in the child the attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge that will govern their offspring’s behavior throughout later life. Schooling, or formal education, consists of experiences that are deliberately planned and utilized to help young people learn what adults consider important for them to know and to help teach them how they should respond to choices.

This education has been influenced by three important parts of modern American society: wisdom of the heart, egalitarianism, and practicality… e greatest of these, practicality. In the absence of written records, no one can be sure what education man first provided for his children. Most anthropologists believe, though, that the educational practices of prehistoric times were probably like those of primitive tribes in the 20th century, such as the Australian aborigines and the Aleuts. Formal instruction was probably given just before the child’s initiation into adulthood — the puberty rite — and involved tribal customs and beliefs too complicated to be learned by direct experience.

Children learned most of the skills, duties, customs, and beliefs of the tribe through an informal apprenticeship — by taking part in such adult activities as hunting, fishing, farming, toolmaking, and cooking. In such simple tribal societies, school was not a special place… it was life itself. However, the educational process has changed over the decades, and it now vaguely represents what it was in ancient times, or even in early American society.

While the schools that the colonists established in the 17th century in the New England, Southern, and Middle colonies differed from one another, each reflected a concept of schooling that had been left behind in Europe. Most poor children learned through apprenticeship and had no formal schooling at all. Those who did go to elementary school were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Learning consisted of memorizing, which was stimulated by whipping. The first “basic textbook,” The New England Primer, was America’s own contribution to education.

Used from 1690 until the beginning of the 19th century, its purpose was to teach both religion and reading. The child learning the letter a, for example, also learned that “In Adam’s fall, We sinned all. ” As in Europe, then, the schools in the colonies were strongly influenced by religion. This was particularly true of the schools in the New England area, which had been settled by Puritans and other English religious dissenters. Like the Protestants of the Reformation, who established vernacular elementary schools in Germany in the 16th century, the Puritans sought to make education universal.

They took the first steps toward government-supported universal education in the colonies. In 1642, Puritan Massachusetts passed a law requiring that every child be taught to read. And, in 1647, it passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act,” so named because its purpose was to defeat Satan’s attempts to keep men, through an inability to read, from the knowledge of the Scriptures. The law required every town of 50 or more families to establish an elementary school and every town of 100 or more families to maintain a grammar school as well. Puritan or not, virtually all of the colonial schools had clear-cut moral purposes.

Skills and knowledge were considered important to the degree that they served religious ends and, of course, “trained” the mind. We call it “wisdom of the heart. ” These matters, by definition, are anything that the heart is convinced of… so thoroughly convinced that it over-powers the judgement of the mind. Early schools supplied the students with moral lessons, not just reading, writing and arithmetic. Obviously, the founders saw it necessary to apply these techniques, most likely “feeling” that it was necessary that the students learn these particular values.

Wisdom of the heart had a profound effect of the curriculum of the early schools. As the spirit of science, commercialism, secularism, and individualism quickened in the Western world, education in the colonies was called upon to satisfy the practical needs of seamen, merchants, artisans, and frontiersmen. The effect of these new developments on the curriculum in American schools was more immediate and widespread than its effect in European schools. Practical content was soon in competition with religious concerns.

The academy that Benjamin Franklin helped found in 1751 was the first of a growing number of secondary schools that sprang up in competition with the Latin schools. Franklin’s academy continued to offer the humanist-religious curriculum, but it also brought education closer to the needs of everyday life by teaching such courses as history, geography, merchant accounts, geometry, algebra, surveying, modern languages, navigation, and astronomy. These subjects were more practical, seeing as how industry and business were driving forces in the creation of the United States.

Religion classes could not support a family or pay the debts. By the mid-19th century this new diversification in the curriculum characterized virtually all American secondary education. America came into its own, educationally, with the movement toward state-supported, secular free schools for all children, which began in the 1820s with the common (elementary) school. The movement gained incentive in 1837 when Massachusetts established a state board of education and appointed the lawyer and politician Horace Mann (1796-1859) as its secretary.

One of Mann’s many reforms was the improvement of the quality of teaching by the establishment of the first public normal (teacher-training) schools in the United States. State after state followed Massachusetts’ example until, by the end of the 19th century, the common-school system was firmly established. It was the first rung of what was to develop into the American educational ladder. After the common school had been accepted, people began to urge that higher education, too, be tax supported.

As early as 1821, the Boston School Committee established the English Classical School (later the English High School), which was the first public secondary school in the United States. By the end of the century, such secondary schools had begun to outnumber the private academies. The original purpose of the American high school was to allow all children to extend and enrich their common-school education. With the establishment of the land-grant colleges after 1862, the high school also became a preparation for college; the step by which students who had begun at the lowest rung of the educational ladder might reach the highest.

In 1873, when the kindergarten became part of the St. Louis, Mo. school system, there was a hint that, in time, a lower rung might be added. Practicality allowed this change in the high school system. Schools now needed to ready the students for college — an even higher form of education — instead of preparing them to immediately enter the work force. America’s educational ladder was unique. Where public school systems existed in European countries such as France and Germany, they were dual systems.

When a child of the lower and middle classes finished his elementary schooling, he could go on to a vocational or technical school. The upper-class child often did not attend the elementary school but was instead tutored until he was about 9 years old and could enter a secondary school, generally a Latin grammar school. The purpose of this school was to prepare him for the university, from which he might well emerge as one of the potential leaders of his country. Instead of two separate and distinct educational systems for separate and distinct classes, the United States provided one system open to everyone… istinctly egalitarian idea.

As in mid-19th-century Europe, women were slowly gaining educational ground in the United States. “Female academies” established by such pioneers as Emma Willard (1787-1870) and Catharine Beecher (1800-78) prepared the way for secondary education for women. In 1861, Vassar, the first real college for women, was founded. Even earlier, in 1833, Oberlin College was founded as a coeducational college, and in 1837, four women began to study there. In the mid-19th century there was yet another change in education.

The secondary-school curriculum, that had been slowly expanding since the founding of the academies in the mid-18th century, virtually exploded. But the voice of practicality cried out again. A new society, complicated by the latest discoveries in the physical and biological sciences and the rise of industrialism and capitalism, called for more and newer kinds of knowledge. By 1861 as many as 73 subjects were being offered by the Massachusetts secondary schools. People still believed that the mind could be “trained,” but they now thought that science could do a better job than the classics could.

The result was a curriculum that was virtually saturated with scientific instruction. The mid-19th-century knowledge explosion also modestly affected some of the common schools, which expanded their curriculum to include such courses as science and nature study. The content of instruction in the common school, beyond which few students went, consisted of the material in a relatively small number of books: assorted arithmetic, history, and geography texts, Webster’s American Spelling Book, and two new books that appeared in 1836 the “First” and “Second” in the series of McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers.

Whereas The New England Primer admonished children against sin, the stories and poems in the readers pressed for the moral virtues. Countless children were required to memorize such admonitions as “Work while you work, play while you play. One thing each time, that is the way. ” In the early days, the common schools consisted of one room where one teacher taught pupils ranging in age from 6 to about 13 and sometimes older. The teacher instructed the children separately, not as a group. The good teacher had a strong right arm and an unshakable determination to cram information into his pupils.

Once the fight to provide free education for all children had been won, educators turned their attention to the quality of that education. To find out more about learning and the learning process, American schools looked to Europe. In the 1860s, they discovered, and for about 20 years were influenced, by Pestalozzi. His belief was that the goal of education should be the natural development of the individual child, and that educators should focus on the development of the child rather than on memorization of subject matter that he or she was unable to understand.

Pestalozzi’s school also mirrored the idea that learning begins with firsthand observation of an object and moves gradually toward the remote and abstract realm of words and ideas. The teacher’s job was to guide, not distort, the natural growth of the child by selecting his experiences and then directing those experiences toward the realm of ideas. The general effect on the common schools was to shift the emphasis from memorization of abstract facts to the firsthand observation of real objects. Pestalozzi’s diminishing influence roughly coincided with the rapid expansion of the cities.

By the 1880s the United States was absorbing several million immigrants a year, a human flood that created new problems for the common school. The question confronting educators was how to impart the largest amount of information to the greatest number of children in the shortest possible time. This new, more practical goal of educators and the means through which they attained it were reflected in the new schools they built and in the new teaching practices they adopted. Out of necessity, the one-room common school was replaced by larger schools.

To make it easier and faster for one teacher to instruct many students, there had to be as few differences between the children as possible. Since the most conspicuous difference was age, children were grouped on this basis, and each group had a separate room. To discourage physical activity that might disrupt discipline and interrupt the teaching process, to encourage close attention to and absorption of the teacher’s words, and to increase eye contact, the seats were arranged in formal rows. For good measure, they frequently were bolted to the floor.

It is not surprising, at about this time, when the goal of education was to expedite the transfer of information to a large number of students, that the normal schools began to fall under the influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). For him, education was neither the training of faculties that exist ready-made in the mind nor a natural unfolding from within. Education was instruction literally a building into the mind from the outside. The building blocks were the materials of instruction the subject matter.

The builder was the teacher. The job of the teacher was to form the child’s mind by building into it the knowledge of man’s cultural heritage through the teaching of such subjects as literature, history, science, and mathematics. Since the individual mind was presumably formed by building into it the products of the collective mind, methods of instruction were concerned wholly with how this was to be done. Herbart’s interest lay in determining how knowledge could be presented so that it would be understood and therefore retained.

He insisted that education must be based on psychological knowledge of the child so that he could be instructed effectively. The essence of his influence probably lay not so much in his carefully evolved five-step lesson plan but in the basic idea of a lesson plan. Such a plan suggested the possibility of evolving a systematic method of instruction that was the same for all pupils. Perhaps Herbart’s emphasis on the importance of motivating pupils to learn whether through presentation of the material or, failing that, through rewards and punishments also influenced the new teaching methods of the 1880s and 1890s.

The new methods, combined with the physical organization of the school, represented the direct opposite of Pestalozzi’s belief that the child’s innate powers should be allowed to develop naturally. Rather, the child must be lopped off or stretched to fit the procrustean curriculum. Subjects were graded according to difficulty, assigned to certain years, and taught by a rigid daily timetable. The amount of information that the child had absorbed through drill and memorization was determined by how much could be extracted from him by examinations. Reward or punishment came in the form of grades.

At the end of the 19th century the methods of presenting information had thus been streamlined. The curriculum had been enlarged and brought closer to the concerns of everyday life. Book learning had been supplemented somewhat by direct observation. And psychological whipping in the form of grades had perhaps diminished any physical whipping. In one respect, however, the schools of the late 19th century were no different from those, say, of the Middle Ages: they were still based on who adults thought children were or should be, not who they really were.

Before the 20th century, the ideas of such men as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and, in the United States, Francis W. Parker (1837-1902) had caused little more than rumblings beneath the floor of the traditional schoolhouse. Because of John Dewey (1859-1952), they gathered force, and in the 1920s and 1930s new and old ideas collided right in the middle of the classroom. Some of the schools, where neat rows of subdued children had sat immobilized in their bolted-down seats listening to a teacher armed with textbook, lesson plan, grade book, and disciplinary ruler, became buzzing places where virtually everything moved, including the chairs.

The children were occupied in groups or worked by themselves, depending on what they were doing. Above all, they were always doing: reading a favorite book, writing, painting, or learning botany by tending, observing, and discussing the plants they were growing. The teacher moved around the room, asking and answering questions, giving a child the spelling of a word he wanted to write or the pronunciation of a word he wanted to read, and in general acting as a helpful guide for the children’s chosen activities. The chattering and noise and activity were signs that the children were excited about and absorbed by what they were doing.

They were, in fact, learning by doing. Dewey maintained that the child is not born with a ready-made faculty called thinking, which needs the exercise of repeated drill to make it as strong as the adult faculty. Nor, he said, is the mind a blank tablet on which knowledge is impressed. Mind thinking or intelligence is, according to Dewey, a developing, growing thing. And the early stages of growth and of knowledge are different from the later stages. The development of the mind begins with the child’s perception of things and facts as they are related to himself, to his personal, immediate world.

A dog is his dog or his neighbor’s dog; it is something furry and warm, something to hug, feed, and play with. The child may recognize the fact that though his neighbor’s dog looks different from his, they are both dogs. When he sees a wolf at the zoo, he may decide that his dog is a nicer and friendlier animal than the wolf. The child’s zoological knowledge is thus organized around his own experiences with particular animals and his perceptions of similarities and differences between those experiences; it is psychologically organized knowledge.

The last step in the growth of intelligence is the ability to organize facts logically, that is, in terms of their relationship to one another. The formulated, logically organized knowledge of the zoologist is that both the wolf and the domesticated dogs belong to the family Canidae, order Carnivora; that the dogs belong to the genus Canis and species familiaris; and that one dog belongs to the sporting breed spaniel, the other to the working breed collie. Presented to the child in this form, however, the study of zoology has no relation to the animals he plays with, feeds, and observes.

His own experience outside of school does not bring the information to life, and the information does not enrich and extend his own experience. It represents another world entirely a world of empty words. All he can do, therefore, is memorize what he reads and is told. He is not developing the power to think. To stimulate the growth of intelligence rather than stifle it, as Dewey saw it, education must begin not at the end but at the beginning of the growth process; that is, with activity that engages the whole child mentally, socially, physically, and emotionally.

Cryogenics is a study that is of great importance to the human race and has been a major project for engineers for the last 100 years. Cryogenics, which is derived from the Greek word kryos meaning “Icy Cold,” is the study of matter at low temperatures. However low is not even the right word for the temperatures involved in cryogenics, seeing as the highest temperature dealt with in cryogenics is 100 (C (-148 (F) and the lowest temperature used, is the unattainable temperature -273. 15 (C (-459. 67 (F).

Also, when speaking of cryogenics, the terms Celsius and Fahrenheit are rarely used. Instead scientists use a different measurement called the Kelvin (K). The Kelvin scale for Cryogenics goes from 173 K to a fraction of a Kelvin above absolute zero. There are also two main sciences used in cryogenics, and they are Superconductivity and Superfluidity. Cryogenics first came about in 1877, when a Swiss Physicist named Rasul Pictet and a French Engineer named Louis P. Cailletet liquefied oxygen for the first time.

Cailletet created liquid oxygen in his lab using a process known as adiabatic expansion, which is a “thermodynamic process in which the temperature f a gas is expanded without adding or extracting heat from the gas or the surrounding system”(Vance 26). At the same time Pictet used the “Joule-Thompson Effect,” a thermodynamic process that states that the “temperature of a fluid is reduced in a process involving expansion below a certain temperature and pressure”(McClintock 4).

After Cailletet and Pictet, a third method, known as cascading, was developed by Karol S. Olszewski and Zygmut von Wroblewski in Poland. At this point in history Oxygen was now able to be liquefied at 90 K, then soon after liquid Nitrogen was obtained at 77 K, and because of these dvancements scientist all over the world began competing in a race to lower the temperature of matter to Absolute Zero (0 K) [Vance, 1-10]. Then in 1898, James DeWar mad a major advance when he succeeded in liquifying hydrogen at 20 K.

The reason this advance was so spectacular was that at 20 K hydrogen is also boiling, and this presented a very difficult handling and storage problem. DeWar solved this problem by inventing a double- walled storage container known as the DeWar flask, which could contain and hold the liquid hydrogen for a few days. However, at this time scientists realized hat if they were going to make any more advances they would have to have better holding containers. So, scientists came up with insulation techniques that we still use today.

These techniques include expanded foam materials and radiation shielding. [McClintock 43-55] The last major advance in cryogenics finally came in 1908 when the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerling Onnes liquefied Helium at 4. 2 and then 3. 2 K. The rest of the advances in cryogenics have been extremely small since it is a fundamental Thermodynamic law that you can approach but never actually reach bsolute zero. Since 1908 our technology has greatly increased and we can now freeze sodium gas to within 40 millionths of a Kelvin above absolute zero.

However, in the back of every physicists head they want to break the Thermodynamic law and reach a temperature of absolute zero where every proton, electron, and neutron in an atom is absolutely frozen. Also , their are two subjects that are also closely related to cryogenics called Superconductivity and Superfluidity. Superconductivity is a low-temperature phenomenon where a metal loses all electrical resistance below a ertain temperature, called the Critical Temperature(Tc), and transfers to “… a state of zero resistance,… “(Tilley 11).

This unusual behavior was also discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. It was discovered when Onnes and one of his graduate students realized that Mercury loses all of its electrical resistance when it reaches a temperature of 4. 15 K. However, almost all elements and compounds have Tc’s between 1 K and 15 K (or -457. 68 (F and -432. 67 (F) so they would not be very useful to us on a day to day basis[McClintock 208- 226]. Then in 1986, J Gregore Bednorz and K. Alex Muller discovered that an oxide of lanthanum, barium, and copper becomes superconductive at 30 K.

This discovery shocked the world and stimulated scientists to find even more “High- Temperature Superconductors”. After this discovery, in 1987, scientists at the University of Houston and the University of Alabama discovered YBCO, a compound with a Tc of 95 K. This discovery made superconductivity possible above the boiling point of liquid Nitrogen, so now the relatively cheap, liquid nitrogen could replace the high priced liquid helium required for cryogenic experiments. To date the highest reported Tc is 125 K, which belongs to a compund made of Thallium, Barium, Calcium, Copper, and Oxygen.

Now, with the availability of high-temperature superconductors, all the sciences including, cryogenics have made extraordinary advances. Some applications are demonstrated by magnetically levitated trains, energy storage, motors, and Zero-Loss Transmission Lines. Also, superconducting electromagnets are used in Particle Accelerators, Fusion Energy Plants, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging devices (MRI’s) in Hospitals. Furthermore high-speed cryogenic computer memories and communication devices are in various stages of research. This field has grown immensely since 1986 as you can see and will probably keep growing.

The second subject related to cryogenics is Superfluidity. Superfluidity is a strange state of matter that is most common in liquid Helium, when it is below a temperature of 2. 17 K. Superfluidity means that the liquid “… discloses no viscosity when traveling through a capillary or narrow slit… “(Landau 195) and also flows “… through the slit disclosing no friction… (Landau 195) That this means is that when Helium reaches this state it can flow, without any friction, through the smallest holes and in between atoms in a compund.

If the top is off the beaker it is also possible for the liquid Helium to flow up the side of the baker and out of the beaker until all the liquid helium is gone. It was then discovered that when any liquid approaches about . 2 K it has almost the exact same properties of superconducting metals, as far as specific heat, magnetic properties, and thermal conductivity. Even though, both superconducting and Superfluidic aterials have similar properties, the phenomenon of Superfluidity is much more complex, and is not completely understood by today’s physicists.

McClintock 103- 107] Cryogenics also consists of many smaller sciences, including Cryobiology, which is “the study of the effects of low-temperatures on materials of biological origin. “(Vance 528) Developments in this field have led to modern methods of preserving blood, semen, tissue, and organs below the temperature that was obtained by the use of liquid nitrogen. Also Cryobiology has led to the development of the cryogenic scalpel which can deaden or destroy tissue with high degree of accuracy, making it possible to clot cuts as soon as you cut them.

So in theory you could one day have surgery without having to deal with any blood. Another field is Cryopumping. Cryopumping is the process “of condensing gas or vapor on a low-temperature surface. “(Vance 339) This is done by extracting gas from a vacuum vessel by conventional methods then freezing the remaining gas on low temperature coils. This process has been useful when trying to simulate the properties that the vacuum in outerspace will have on electronic circuitry.

Cryogenics has also been a part of many modern advances including: The transportation of energy in the form of a liquefied gas. Processing, handling, and providing food by cryogenic means has become a large business, providing both frozen and freeze-dried food. Liquid Oxygen powers rockets and propulsion systems for space research. Liquid Hydrogen is used in high-energy physics experiments. Using cryogenic drill bits so drilling for oil and other gases is easier. Chemical synthesis and catalysis. Better fire fighting fluids. Gas separation. Metal Fabrication.

As you can see by now cryogenics is still a very young science, but in the last ten years it has catapulted to being the backbone of almost every other form of science. However, its full potential will probably not be understood for quite a while. Though, as you can see, if we can grasp the concepts of cryogenics we will have a tool that will allow us to do things ranging from making better drill bits to exploring the universe. The future of cryogenics can best be summed up by Krafft A. Ehricke, a rocket developer, when he said, “It’s centeral goal is the preservation of civilization. “

In Peter Elbows, Writing for Teachers, he states, Teachers are one of the trickiest audiences of all, yet they also illustrate the paradox that audiences sometimes help you and sometimes get in your way. A teachers experience can give a student author valuable insight to the development of his writing, while at the same time offer criticism that may prove beneficial. Unfortunately, the relationship between a student and his teacher is a very difficult one that often poses more problems than can be resolved.

In order to become a more proficient writer, a student must be able to write in numerous voices, or at least develop one to use as a platform. In order to find and utilize his voice, an author must be able to specifically identify his audience and then determine the type of discourse that would prove most effective. This can become an impossible task when a student views a teacher as his audience, while the teacher is determined not to be the audience. A teachers decision to be nothing more than a proofreader is based on sound reasoning.

With a teacher as the intended audience, a student will attempt to change his style in order to receive a higher grade. Not only is it uncomfortable for the author to write in a voice not his own, but when a teacher returns his essay, he is certain to be disappointed by his mark. A teacher would find his paper awkward as a result of his unsure voice. This is only more frustrating for the student, who believed that his paper was what the teacher wanted. Furthermore, the student is questioning his own ability to produce an essay that expresses his own beliefs rather than those of his teacher.

The opposite type of student can pose an equally destructive problem. A student who has already developed a strong voice and style of his own may feel forced to impress his teacher. This type of student will often receive a high grade, but when he is required to write a paper for a real audience, he will discover his method no longer works. As Elbow puts it, Teachers are not the real audience. You dont write to teachers, you write for them. To avoid being named as the audience, a teacher often reads papers as an omniscient character.

He may provide his own input at times, but prefers to observe and thus determine the reaction a general reader would have when reading the essay. This general reader is best described as, a creature blessed by intelligence, a certain amount of education (general), and an open mind. (Elbow) Because the general reader and the teacher are so closely connected, there is always confusion (even on the teachers behalf) concerning the opinions of such an ill-defined and vague personality.

Elbow considers this problem and writes, Its hard to argue well or learn about argument when you are unsure who your audience is and what its position on the topic is likely to be. Also in Writing for Teachers, Elbow states, Students discover they get knocked down more when they try their hardest. All but the born fighters learn to hold backto do less than their bestwhen they spar with teachers. This behavior produces many disadvantages. Not only does it eliminate any sense of motivation the student may previously have entertained, but it teaches each author that it is okay, and even acceptable, to turn in work that is less than their best.

This learned behavior is also responsible for the production of bull as described by William G. Perry, Jr. in Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts, To bull- To present evidence of an understanding of form in the hope that the reader may be deceived into supposing a familiarity with content. When a student uses such a technique in his writing, it is hard to believe that he put much effort into his piece and yet, he will most likely be rewarded with a decent grade.

Perry reasons, Perhaps this value accounts for the final anomaly: as instructors, we are inclined to reward bull highly, where we do not detect its intent, to the consternation of the bullsters acquaintances. Perhaps a teachers willingness to accept mediocre work is based on the fact that he thinks the author may not be able to take his criticism. This is nothing short of a friendly consideration on the teachers part, but it is an unnecessary one. Students receive so much criticism from others on a daily basis that a few comments on an essay do nothing to rival.

Harsh as they may seem, these comments are actually helping the student to become a better writer. When the author is asked to write a paper for a real rather than general audience, he will be much more capable because his teacher has given him honest feedback as to how a person would actually react to his essay. Unfortunately, those students whose instructors refuse to provide criticism will never know what parts of their papers to improve upon. Elbow effectively makes his point by stating, the student never gets the experience of learning what actually happens to a real reader reading his words.

How can students get around all of these obstacles and write a paper that appeals to both the teacher and the “general reader? Perhaps this is the intended purpose of writing classes: to teach students to become better versed in writing for many people all at once. For those who may find it difficult to cope with the conflict caused where academic discourse is concerned, Elbow offers some free advice that may prove very helpful. Asking a teacher to provide a more clearly explained set of directions could be very favorable.

Besides the obvious advantages that an increased amount of clarity would furnish, the teacher may also choose to sponsor a class discussion on the exact audience of their papers. Every time an essay is assigned, it would be to both the teachers and the students benefit to consider the topic of the paper and then deduce what disposition a general reader would take on such an issue or event. By clearly defining the audience, the author is not only learning to address his readers, but he is also beginning to realize the relationship between the style of a piece of literature and the audience it attempts to reach.

Probably one of the most effective pieces of advice offered by Elbow is, your teacher is a friend doing you a favornot an employee doing a duty. Much of the reason there is a problem between students and teachers to begin with is the fact that instructors feel insulted when authors turn in their final papers complete with abundant mistakes. A teacher could not be more offended. These educators are willing to give the student their expertise for free, and yet some students treat them as if they are responsible for cleaning up foolish errors that could very easily have been fixed.

Elbow, a teacher himself, lists several pieces of common sense that he expects from his students. First, he expects that each paper be neat and as mistake-free as possible. Next, he asks that each paper be turned in on time. He goes on to mention how important it is to stick to the assignment and not rattle on about topics totally unrelated to that which you are supposed to be discussing. Although no student can be forced to follow each of these requests, if they are disregarded the teacher will undoubtedly become less motivated to try to understand an unclear passage or explain an error in the future.

Much of Elbows advice is sensible and will help the student a great deal if applied correctly. However, several of his suggestions seem impractical. For example, Elbow recommends arranging an alternate assignment with the teacher. Teachers assign different projects because there is a certain skill they want to teach. Although an alternate assignment may indeed be able to offer the same type of learning, there is also the issue of fairness. Other students in the classroom may assume that the teacher is showing favoritism to another student.

Instead of the student being the one to take the initiative to come up with an alternate assignment, the teacher should suggest two or three essay topics that students may choose from. In this way, the teacher is providing a range of questions that ask the student to use the technique the teacher is reinforcing. Then, both teacher and student are satisfied and none of the students suspect that any other is being given special privileges. Elbow also suggests bringing in outside readers as a new audience for the students. Every once in a while, this would be a very beneficial event, however, it would take a large amount of planning to execute.

All of the work that would be put into the organization of such an event seems needless when there is a perfect audience already assembled- classmates. Not only will peers help correct grammatical and structural errors, but by reading others papers, students are learning about other styles of writing and adding these different voices to their own repertoire. There are many problems in the relationship between students and teachers that can be solved simply by introducing classmates as the audience. Obviously, the conflict teachers have within themselves while deciding whether their true reactions are too harsh to relay to their students.

Elbow suggests submitting an evaluation-type form along with the essay, so that both the teacher and the student understand what is expected as far as comments and feedback go. However, even if only half of a teachers students submitted such a form, the workload created would be enormous. The simple and more effective solution is to provide each student with a general evaluation sheet and have each student trade with another classmate so that everyone receives feedback from a real person- not just a general reader.

Receiving feedback such as this aids a student in improving much more than the style in which he presents his material. Elbow states in his article, But if your teacher only tells you what you did wrong you may not be able to fix it no matter how clearly he explains the problem: hes asking for behavior youve never produced before. When students exchange papers, each author is given the chance to explore the different ways of communicating a thought and presenting an idea. Every student has his strong points and every student has his weak points.

So, if there is a particular passage a student needs help with, there is bound to be another student who is strong in that area and could only benefit from helping him. It is one thing to learn something, but quite another to actually explain it to someone else in terms that they are capable of understanding. By doing this both students are learning: one is coming to an even greater understanding of the principle which he is trying to explain, and the other is learning a technique he has never encountered before. The relationship between teachers and students is one that can not be solved easily.

Each teacher is different and has his own methods of conveying information to students. The only practical way to become better at writing for teachers is to get to know the instructor then adjust your own work habits so that both of you can make the most of your time. Overall, this will produce a less stressful working environment and both the teacher and the student will be more willing to accommodate each other. Ultimately, this will resolve the dilemma between the instructor and the author while providing an increased understanding of literary techniques to the student.

On the seventeenth day in May 1954 a decision was made which changed things in the United States dramatically. For millions of black Americans, news of the U. S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education meant, at last, that they and their children no longer had to attend separate, and almost universally unequal, schools. Brown v. Board of Education was a Supreme Court ruling that changed the life of every American forever.

In Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school refused. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help.

The NAACP was eager to assist the Browns, as it had long wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. Other black parents joined Brown, and, in 1951, the NAACP requested an injunction that would forbid the segregation of Topeka’s public schools (NAACP). The U. S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard Brown’s case from June 25-26, 1951. At the trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were unequal.

The Board of Education’s defense was that, because segregation in Topeka and elsewhere pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. The board also argued that segregated schools were not necessarily harmful to black children; great African Americans had overcome much more than just segregated schools and became very successful. The request for an injunction pushed the court to make a difficult decision.

On one hand, the judges agreed with the Browns; saying that: “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children… A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn” (The National Center For Public Research). On the other hand, the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson allowed separate but equal school systems for blacks and whites, and no Supreme Court ruling had overturned Plessy yet.

Because of the precedent of Plessy, the court felt “compelled” to rule in favor of the Board of Education (Cozzens). Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951. Their case was combined with other cases that challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court first heard the cases on December 9, 1952, but failed to reach a decision. The judges had to decide whether or not the writers of the Fourteenth Amendment had desegregated schools in mind. The court ruling eventually came to be unanimous.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court asked this question in the decision read on May 17, 1954: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? ” (The National Center for Public Research). They struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy for public education saying that it “has no place”, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and required the desegregation of schools across America (The National Center For Public Research).

On that Monday in May, the high court’s ruling that outlawed school segregation in the United States generated urgent news flashes on the radio and frenzied black. One swift and unanimous decision by the top judges in the land was going to end segregation in public schools. Southern politicians reacted with such fury and fear that they immediately called the day “Black Monday. ” South Carolina Gov. James Byrnes, who rose to political power with passionate advocacy of segregation, said the decision was “the end of civilization in the South as we have known it. ”

Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge struck an angry tone. He said Georgia had no intention of allowing “mixed race” schools as long as he was governor. He touched on Confederate pride from the days when the South went to war with the federal government over slavery by telling supporters that the Supreme Court’s ruling was not law in his state; he said it was “the first step toward national suicide. ” The Brown v Board of Education decision should be regarded, he said, as nothing but a “mere scrap of paper” (Patterson). Southern whites were in strong support of segregated schools.

Newspapers for black readers reacted with satisfaction. “The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation,” said Harlem’s Amsterdam News. A writer in the Chicago Defender explained, “neither the atomic bomb nor the hydrogen bomb will ever be as meaningful to our democracy,” and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer who directed the legal fight that led to Brown v Board of Education, predicted the end of segregation in all American public schools by the fall of 1955 (Patterson).

This decision was one of life changing proportions for all Americans but for black people it was also one huge step toward equality and eventually total freedom. However, ten years after the decision very little school integration had taken place. True to the challenging words of segregationist governors, the Southern states had hunkered down in a massive resistance campaign against school integration. Some Southern counties even closed their schools instead of allowing blacks and whites into the same classrooms.

In other towns, segregationist academies opened, and most if not all of the white children left the public schools for the racially exclusive alternatives. Some parents of white children chose to pay for private school tuition in order to maintain segregation. In most places, the governors, mayors, and school boards found it easy enough to just ask for more time before integrating schools (Patterson). Many southerners were so racist they would do anything not to go to a school with black children. This extremely slow approach worked.

In 1957, President Eisenhower had to send troops from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock just to get nine black children safely into Central High School. In response to this Arkansas closed all public high schools for two years (Patterson). Only in the late 1960s, under the threat of losing federal funding, did large-scale school integration begin in Southern public schools. In many places, in both the North and the South, black and white students did not go to school together until a federal court ordered school children to ride buses across town to bring the races together (Cozzens).

Today, a study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University finds that the percentage of white students attending public schools with Hispanic or black students has steadily declined since 1988. In fact, the report concludes that school integration in the United States is “lower in 2000 than in 1970, before busing for racial balance began. ” In the South, home to the majority of America’s black population, there is now less school integration than there was in 1970.

The Harvard report concluded, “At the beginning of the 21st century, American schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous re-segregation. ” Today, America’s schools are so heavily segregated that more than two-thirds of black and Hispanic students are in schools where a majority of the students are not white. Also today, most of the nation’s white children attend a school that is almost 80 percent white (NAACP). Hispanics are now the most segregated group of students in the nation because they live in highly concentrated clusters.

Fifty years later, the Brown v Board of Education decision looks different. The real impact of the legal, political, and cultural eruption that changed America is not exactly what it first appeared to be. Segregated housing patterns and an increase in the number of black and Hispanic immigrants have concentrated minorities in poverty-stricken areas of big cities and created a new reality of public schools segregated by race and class. Today, it is hard to even remember America before Brown v Board of Education because the ruling completely changed the nation.

Before the Brown v Board of Education decision, the federal government lent its power to enforcing the laws of segregation under an 1896 Supreme Court ruling that permitted “separate but equal” treatment of blacks and whites. Blacks and whites who tried to integrate factories, unions, public buses and trains, parks, the military, restaurants, department stores, and more found that the power of the federal government was with the segregationists. Before Brown v Board of Education, the federal government had struggled even to pass a law banning lynching (Cozzens).

But after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was a violation of the Constitution, the federal attitude toward enforcing second-class citizenship for blacks shifted on the scale of a change in the ocean’s tide or a movement in the plates of the continents. Once the highest court in the land said equal treatment for all did not allow for segregation, then the lower courts, the Justice Department, and federal prosecutors, as well as the FBI, all switched sides (Patterson). They didn’t always act to promote integration, but they no longer used their power to stop it.

An irreversible shift had begun, and it was the direct result of the Brown v Board of Education decision. The change in the attitude of federal officials created a wave of anticipation among black people, who became alert to the possibility of achieving the long-desired goal of racial equality. The year after the Brown v Board of Education case, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That led to a year long bus boycott and the emergence of massive, nonviolent protests for equal rights.

That same year, a 27 year-old man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the nation’s prophet of civil rights for all Americans (NAACP). Kings grandfather had earlier led the protests resulting in Atlanta’s first black high school and his father was a minister and community leader as well. King encouraged others to organize peaceful protests. In 1960 a group of black college students rose to King’s challenge and organized a sit-in at a local Woolworth’s lunch counter designated “whites only” in Greensboro, South Carolina.

News reports of the sit-in and the resultant harassment the students endured, inspired a sit-in movement that spread across the nation to combat segregation (Patterson). Black Americans were taking full and long awaited advantage of the Brown v Board of Education decision. Stand like Rosa Parks became more common. Blacks were determined to get their freedom and were stopping at nothing to get their word heard. This change in black and white attitudes toward race also had an impact on culture. Churches began to grapple with the Christian and Jewish principles of loving thy neighbor, even if thy neighbor had a different color skin.

Major league baseball teams no longer feared a fan revolt if they allowed more than one black player on a team. Black writers, actors, athletes, and musicians, ranging from James Baldwin to the Supremes and Muhammad Ali, began to cross over into the mainstream of American culture (Cozzens). The other side of the change in racial attitudes was white support for equal rights. College-educated young white people in the 1960s often defined themselves by their willingness to embrace racial equality. Bob Dylan sang about the changing times as answers “blowing in the wind.

Movies like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” found major audiences among all races, and previously all-white private colleges and universities began opening their doors to black students (Cozzens). The resulting arguments over affirmative action in college admissions led to the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in the University of California v Bakke case, which outlawed the use of quotas, and its recent ruling that the University of Michigan can take race into account as one factor in admitting students to its law school. The court has also had to deal with affirmative action in the business world, in both hiring and contracts (Patterson).

All of these questions were a result the questions of equality in the Constitution raised by the Brown v Board of Education decision. However, the most important legacy of the Brown v Board of Education decision, by far, is the growth of an educated black middle class. The number of black people graduating from high school and college has soared since Brown v Board of Education, and the incomes of blacks have climbed steadily as a result. Home ownership and investment in the stock market among black Americans have rocketed since the 1980s.

The political and economic force of that black middle class continues to bring America closer to the vision of racial equality that Dr. King might have dreamed of 50 years ago. The Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954, ruling in Brown v Board of Education remains a landmark legal decision. This decision is huge not only because it changed the history of America forever but also because it was a huge step for blacks in the United States. This decision would eventually lead to the full freedom of blacks in America. Brown v Board of Education is the “Big Bang” of all American history in the 20th century.

I asked myself nearly a year ago. I was at the time involved in Industrial Technology with a concentration in Drafting & Design. Unchallenged and bored with that particular field of study, I searched for something new, but yet somewhat the same. I saw a flyer posted in Flanagan Hall at my former stomping ground, East Carolina University, that said teachers were desperately needed at local high schools. Some of the subjects they needed teachers in included: Electronics, Wood Shop, Auto Mechanics, Computer Applications, and the one that caught my eye the most, Drafting & Design.

The flyer said all you needed to teach middle and high school in these particular subjects was a BS in Industrial Technology (but teacher certification was a plus was noted in the fine print). I did some research on Technology Education and did some personal reflection if this was a career I was really interested in. “It sure beats a 9 to 5 job,” I thought, “and it cant be monotonous because every day you do something new especially in the type of teaching Id like to pursue, Drafting & Design. ”

Over the weekend I did some more research on a professional organization that is directly related to my field, Industrial Technology Education Association (ITEA). ITEA is a large, in fact the largest, professional educational association devoted to enhancing technology education through experiences in our schools (K-12). ITEA covers individuals and institutions throughout the world with the primary membership in North America. More than forty thousand technology educators in the United States alone represent ITEA.

The corporate members of ITEA are comprised of leading technology companies. ITEA’s mission is to advance technological means for all people. ITEA tries to meet the professional needs and interests of members as well as to improve public understanding of technology education and its contributions. ITEA conducts various professional development programs and holds an annual conference. This conference is the largest technology education show of exhibits and educational sessions in the world. Wow!

Some publications the Industrial Technology Education Association compose include the following: The Technology Teacher, Technology and Children, and The Journal of Technology Education. There are ten committees that organize the aspects of technology education. These committees of ITEA also sponsor dozens of meetings, conferences, and exhibits each year. They also sponsor an active honor and awards program that identifies outstanding teachers and programs (K-12) from states, provinces and countries that are affiliated with the Association.

ITEA also presents award certificates and supports other programs that recognize outstanding efforts in the technology teaching profession. The last thing I want to mention here is that ITEA performs a strong public policy program, frequently providing information to the government, local and national agencies & associations, and other special interest groups that deal with technology education.

The Association attempts to provide an understanding of the importance of technology education to the future growth and welfare of all nations. ITEA provides many professional services that are available to teachers. As stated before, the Industrial Technology Educational Association provides a variety of publications and videos. This material leads the teachers by providing teaching directions, instructional ideas, and networking opportunities.

educDorm life at Bowling Green State University is like most other colleges. Students that live in the dorms are known to become very close, often walking to classes together, playing sports, and staying up late for all night study sessions. The students that live in the dorms are in some sense, a society. Every person has a responsibility. Sometimes, if any one person does not complete what they are responsible for, the whole society has to pay. There can be many problems in a dorm. Students playing music too loud in their rooms after quiet hours, and not respecting others are examples of problems that only affect one or two people.

Problems like leaving the hall a mess and leaving trash in the bathroom are problems that affect the whole dorm. By leaving trash in the hallway or in the bathrooms, the student runs the risk of being fined from the custodial services for having to take out the room trash. These fines are extremely harsh. At one point, a floor would be fined $11 for a custodial worker to have to pick up a pizza box. Other problems include plates, silverware, and trays from the dining hall winding up in the hallway, leaving the bathroom a mess, and vomiting.

The whole floor is charged with this fine if the actual culprit isnt found. Durham 2 Dorm policy is to fine the students on the floor that the incident occurred on. These fines can become quite excessive, sometimes exceeding $500 per semester. A student cannot receive his or her final grades for the year unless these fines are paid in whole. This brings up the question, Is it right for all the students on the floor to be fined if only one or a few of the residents went against the rules? Should a few bad apples ruin the whole bunch? I think not.

I feel that someone should address the problem by holding monthly, if not weekly meetings to inform the students that they need to take their trash out instead of placing it in the bathroom. Students need to be told that trays and all other silverware and plates need to be returned to the dining hall. Repetition is the key. If the solution is pounded and pounded into the students heads, then they will begin to obey. A hall director could also keep the students thinking by reminding them how much the floor owes, and what their share is.

Constant reminders will deter the students from breaking the rules. Another, the idea of Terri Capellman, graduate hall director of Compton Hall in the Kreischer Quad at BGSU, is to install cameras to catch the violators in the act. The sight of a camera watching the hallway would be enough to prevent trash being left in the hallway, potential acts of vandalism and theft. Either of these two potential solutions would work, but have we confronted the real question? Who should pay for all the damage that occurs in the residence halls? If there is an emergency after the hour of 12 a. to 8 a. m. on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, then an Emergency Maintenance custodian has to come and Durham 3 fix the problem.

This person is of course paid for their overtime. An emergency maintenance custodian can be called in at any time of the night. If an emergency maintenance custodian is needed, then they are paid for 4 hours of regular time, no matter how long they stay there. The starting wage for a full time custodian is $9. 93/hour. (Payroll Office Statistic) This means that the custodian was paid at least $39. to come in and clean up something that could have taken ten minutes to clean up such as broken glass.

The students on the violating floor are charged for this salary. The custodians may say that the wages they are given for coming in at unacceptable hours of the night are legit. They seem extreme to me. I think that the custodians should of course be paid extra for coming in at such late hours, but maybe not as much as is said. A reasonable wage for an emergency maintenance custodian is $30. Keep in mind that the $9. 93 is a starting wage, and since we are at a state funded university, those wages get raised in no time.

A good pay for an emergency maintenance custodian would be $19. 86/hour. This is double what they make during the day and there is no additional cost for time that is not spent on working. A solution to the whole emergency maintenance deal is to have one of the night guards or an on duty resident advisor clean up the mess. There are always three night guards on duty from the hours of 12 a. m. to 4 a. m. The job of these people is to check in residents coming in after the hour of midnight. Does the front desk really need 3 people doing the work of two?

Durham 4 An on duty RA that has nothing to do could also be a possible solution for the cleanup. On most nights the on duty RA has nothing to do, but they are being paid for doing it. Put them to work. Trash and trays left in the hallway are not the only things that a custodian might have to clean up. As you may know, drinking is quite common among college students. If a resident were to puke due to the consumption of too much alcohol after the hour of 12 a. m. then once again the emergency maintenance custodian would have to be called once again.

All of these violations do not make hall directors happy. They are the ones that control the budgets of the residence halls. If too much money is being spent in one area of the dorm, then the students have to pay. If there is a complaint of trash or trays in one of the bathrooms, then the students have to pay. Why should all the residents have to pay for something that one person did? According to the BGSU student handbook, the policy is this way because the students are the ones that know who is committing all these violations.

When the students see others committing a violation of the rules, they should take action by telling the person politely that the fine for what he or she is doing will be assessed to the whole floor. If the violator is outnumbered, he or she might feel pressured to obey the wishes of his or her peers. In conclusion, it should be shown that the individual student should not be fined for something that one of their peers did. I have given a few solutions of how to cut costs for the residence halls so the students do not have to be fined as much.

I understand that someone has to pay for the damage that is made but I also think that it should be the person or persons that commit the crime. I am a college student and my floor has already accumulated well over $2000 dollars so far this school year. I feel that it is not fair that I have to pay for something that I didnt do. Pop cans, Styrofoam cups and trays make the dorm look like a junkyard. The ultimate thing that needs to happen is the students need to take responsibility for their own actions.

Some People say that the world has many opportunities, some say that you cant get anywhere unless you are born to some certain class of people. Some even say that it is pure fate that brings you where you are going to be and what you get is what you get and you cant do anything about it. I think that people decide their own fates and it doesnt matter who was your parents or how much money you have. I think that your education is the most important thing that you can have in life it can bring you many things like; advancement, family, stability, a career, and of course

In many countries your job is already decided when you are born because of what your parent does for a living and their stature in society. That is many people say that the United States is the land of opportunity, you can do what ever you want with your life as long as you earn it and have the right qualifications. You can decide weather you want to continue after high school and education or get a minimum wage job. Many people take that right for granted and they put off college until they after they have a family and get settled with out knowing that their family will ake up the rest of their lives.

People who are from other countries who move to take advantage of this right we take for granted understand the purpose of a higher education. Advancement is inevitable no matter what you do you will have to be going forward in some way. Weather your advancement is to a new position in your job or a whole knew career, even if all you are doing is going to the next day you are advancing. I think that if you want to decide where you are going to advance to you have to have a good education.

If you dont have a good ducation you are going to play life like that lottery, you may go to a better job where you get better money or you can get fired because they want someone with more education. You never know what can happen to you in the next week or even the next day. Family is one of my biggest priorities in life besides my education. The future, that is how I look at family. Either you can teach your kids about higher education by example or by your mistakes.

You also need a higher education for a family because you need to manage the bills and keep up ooks on your finances. If you have no education and a bad job you will never have your own home. You will not be able to provide for your children or yourself as well as you would if you A career is the goal of most people in the world, but sometimes I think that there are not enough available for all the people who want one, so if you want to get one you will have to work foe it and prove yourself to be worthy of the job you desire. So that requires a higher education.

With a career you have all the things that I have mentioned available to you. You can even get your own business and be your own boss. You can save money and plan for retirement, you can start a college fund for your children so they can get a higher education as well. Knowledge is the key to the world. It is the factor between man and beast, between who you are and who you want to be. Knowledge is what having a higher education is all about. If you had all the knowledge in the world you would be undefeatable. No one could stand in you way.

You need knowledge to teach others how to become what they want to be, you can teach the next eneration who will take care of what you have worked your whole life for and if you have knowledge you will teach them right and trust that they wont destroy your dreams. When the people say that the world has many opportunities I think that they are correct. The world does have many opportunities, people just have to work for them. It is not fate that decides what you are going to be or where you are going. People decide their own fate and take advantage of the opportunities that they choose.

I think that fate is just something that people who are lazy and want the world to come to them thought up. They really had no plans on getting a higher education or actually working for what they wanted in life, so they thought up an idea to soothe their conscience in thinking that there was no problem with not working for what you need to achieve in life. Or maybe fate is something that people with a lucky streak thought up because they had no other explanation for their fortune and they had to give it a label.

Stability is very important to many people, some people travel all around the country moving from house to house never knowing where they will live the following months. All because they keep losing their jobs to people who have gone on and achieved a higher education. To the employer a person with a higher education is more of an asset to the company and they are willing o sacrifice their current employees to obtain their services. So when you have a higher education the employer is less willing to sacrifice your services and you will be guaranteed a job or a long time.

With an on going job you will continue to learn the skills needed and you will continue to grow as an employee, thus creates stability. Through a higher education you can achieve allot of things such as , advancement, Family values, a successful career, and vast knowledge of the world around you to make you aware of the future and the things that will come to be. Even if you believe in fate you can say that if you dont get a higher education you will have the fate of a unsuccessful person and be destined not to have the life you have always dreamed.

Education seems to be becoming more and more of a controversial subject not only among government, but also with school boards, teachers, parents, and even the students. Some of this controversy is attributed to the normal routine things such as starting times, funding for clubs and sports, and more recently the rise of violence in the schools, as well as outcries from the church for the return of religion in the schools. However, people of todays society are even more confused by the recent additions of new subjects not only the college curriculum but also in the curriculum of grade schoolers as well.

These additions include the study of non-western cultures, the study of women and ethnic minorities in the U. S. , and finally the study of human sexuality. In addition, people are wondering what exactly education has to do with being a world citizen? Is the life experience enough to become a world citizen? According to Nussbaum, a world citizen can be understood in two ways, the first being the strict of the two is the ideal of citizen whose primary loyalty is to human beings the world over, and whose nationalityare considered distinctly secondary (1).

An example that one could use to paint a picture of this type of world citizen could be Ghandi or Mother Teresa who both put others, no matter their race or gender, above themselves. The second way is much more relaxed and states that however we order our varied loyalties, we should still be sure that we recognize the worth of human life wherever it occurs and see ourselves as bound by common human abilities and problems to people who lie at a great distance from us (2). An example that fits this description could be Princess Di or the Reverend Jesse Jackson. But, how exactly does one become this so-called world citizen?

In The Old Education and the Think-Academy, Nussbaum gives us three of the numerous steps needed in order to become a good citizen. Nussbaum tells us that there are three essential ingredients for becoming a world citizen, the first being the critical examination of ones self, which is simply examining your life, where you have been and where you are going. The second of these is to see oneself as not just a citizen but as a group. Nussbaum is simply telling us that to often we get so wrapped up in our labels that we tend to forget that we are all human beings, and that we are all connected to one another.

The last ingredient is that of the narrative imagination, which is the ability think about situations in an objective manner by putting yourself in someone elses shoes. But, the question still remains what is the importance of education versus lifetime experience in becoming the good citizen? According to Martha Nussbaum, educating the young has everything to due with becoming a world citizen. A prevailing theme that seems to occur in Martha Nussbaums literary essays entitled The Old Education and the Think-Academy and Socratic Self-Examination seems to be the equality of all whether it be in everyday life or in education.

We are now trying to build an academy in which women, and members of religious and ethnic minorities, and lesbian and gay people, and people living in non-Western cultures can be seen and also heard, with respect and love, both as knowers and as objects of studyan academy in which the world will be seen to have many types of citizens and in which we can all learn to function as citizens of that entire world, (3)is the statement Nussbaum uses to make the point that equality is needed in todays education.

Imagine an academy in which one can learn about all aspects of life with the freedom to question and explore? A teachers task, according to Socrates, was to provoke people into thinking for themselves, rather than to teach them anything they did not already know. Nussbaum proves this to be true when she tells us about the University of Chicago and how the chain-link fence out back of the law school parking lot marks the line between the university campus and the impoverished black community that surrounds it. )Nussbaum, being a philosopher, a scholar, a teacher, as well as a student, appears more than sufficiently equipped to deal with the educational aspect of a person. Nussbaum, as well as Socrates, tend to think that the educational background of the student as well as the curriculum they are taught effect the outcome of the student as far as becoming a world citizen is concerned.

According to the World Citizen Organization, a world citizen is an inhabitant that embraces all considerations… aware of the Global Learning Framework; including perspective awareness, health of planet awareness, systems awareness, being involved being prepared, and a life-long learner aware of the inter-connectedness of all things; oneness, aware of environmental inter-relatedness of the four E’s: economics, energy, ethics, and health, having a preferred worldview (5).

It would seem that there is a unifying theme amongst all of this that the world citizen is simply a well-rounded person who simply takes the time to learn about, and understand others. Without education though, one cannot obtain the proper tactics needed in order to question and understand not only ones own culture, but also the many diverse cultures that exist on our planet.

A study guide is a teaching aid designed to help students develop reading skills needed to enhance their comprehension of the material is the textbook. Study guides can be very helpful to students who have low comprehension skills. A study guide will ensure that the student will focus their attention on what is important for them to learn. The study guide has to be relevant to the test that will be given. Many teachers will assign a specific reading for the class and many of the students may not adhere to the teacher’s request.

A study guide will reinforce the reading material. A study guide that is prepared without the answers will force a student to do the reading. A study investigated the use of study guides as instructional tools and compared the effectiveness of study guides with and without analogies. Seventy-four undergraduate students in three upper division education classes studied three passages about three obscure religions (Manichaeism, Jainism, and the Druze religion) with and without the aid of two types of studyguides.

One study guide analogized the religions to Christianity, and one did not employ analogies. Both study guides were written in multiple-choice, short answer, and essay format. Within each class, students were randomly divided into three groups for comparison, and each subject was given all three passages to study in different sequences, studying one passage per treatment condition. Results revealed a significant interaction between text and treatment, but with a small effect size.

Results also revealed: (1) that the Manichaeism text produced scores significantly different from the combination of Druze and Jainism scores across all three treatments; (2) that the Manichaeism study guide treatments produced scores significantly different from those of the other two treatments; and (3) that the Druze analogical study guide treatment produced scores significantly different from those of the other treatments, but that the Jainism analogical study guide treatment was not significantly different from the other two treatments.

A study explored whether the use of a study guide would improve students’ comprehension of content area material. Two groups of students in an eighth grade social studies class were involved: students in the control group received the usual instruction–the chapter was read orally and discussed in class–while students in the experimental sample were given a study guide, skimmed the material silently, and worked on the exercises in groups of two or three. A posttest on history revealed no statistically significant differences between the scores of the two groups.

How ever, since both time and the amount of material were limited and since no information is available regarding the reliability of the method used, the results of this study can be applied only to these two samples. Reading in the content areas from grades four through twelve requires the integration of new knowledge with what is already known,that involves sophisticated skills. Content area teachers must be aware of, model, and teach those reading and study skills that help students to better comprehend their reading assignments.

Some strategies that have been used successfully to train students to acquire information on their own include the use of prediction guides, advance organizers, graphic organizers, study guides, and glossing. In most of the studies that I read, the use of a study guide improved most of the test scores. Study guides are a useful tool that can be used in any content area to enhance a students learning. The idea behind study guides is that students can use them as models of how to plan their own scheme of work. They are meant to primarily to be an initiation to self-direction.

A survey was administered to 10th-grade regular biology students to diagnose the cause for low achievement on chapter tests. Survey results verified teacher suspicion that students did not read textbook assignments when designated as homework and, as a consequence, this deficiency contributed to low achievement scores. A treatment included requiring additional homework in the form of a teacher-prepared Reading Study Guide (RSG) that accompanied each chapter and had to be completed while students read the assignments.

To complete the individualized RSG, students were unable to skim the material but, instead, had to read the assignments thoroughly. Upon completion of the RSG, a pretest was administered and learning activities relative to the chapter objectives were presented, followed by a posttest. Cloze test results indicated improvement in student ability levels. Posttest scores increased significantly and the overall grade average on the RSG surpassed expectations.

During treatment, cloze test results disclosed that student ability levels were not equivalent to reading stanine levels. Overall results provided evidence that Reading Study Guides Was an excellent resource when used with students who have the potential to improve learning skills and increase achievement levels. The RSG treatment was successful as it highlighted course objectives, outlined important concepts and information, was used to study for tests, and encouraged students to read homework assignments.

The American educator Horace Mann once said: “As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated. ” Education is the process through which people endeavor to pass along to their children their hard-won wisdom and their aspirations for a better world. This process begins shortly after birth, as parents seek to train the infant to behave as their culture demands.

They soon, for instance, teach the child how to turn babbling sounds into language and, through example and precept, they try to instill in the child the attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge that will govern their offspring’s behavior throughout later life. Schooling, or formal education, consists of experiences that are deliberately planned and utilized to help young people learn what adults consider important for them to know and to help teach them how they should respond to choices. This education has been influenced by three important parts of modern American society: wisdom of the heart, egalitarianism, and practicality… e greatest of these, practicality.

In the absence of written records, no one can be sure what education man first provided for his children. Most anthropologists believe, though, that the educational practices of prehistoric times were probably like those of primitive tribes in the 20th century, such as the Australian aborigines and the Aleuts. Formal instruction was probably given just before the child’s initiation into adulthood — the puberty rite — and involved tribal customs and beliefs too complicated to be learned by direct experience.

Children learned most of the skills, duties, customs, and beliefs of the tribe through an informal apprenticeship — by taking part in such adult activities as hunting, fishing, farming, toolmaking, and cooking. In such simple tribal societies, school was not a special place… it was life itself. However, the educational process has changed over the decades, and it now vaguely represents what it was in ancient times, or even in early American society.

While the schools that the colonists established in the 17th century in the New England, Southern, and Middle colonies differed from one another, each reflected a concept of schooling that had been left behind in Europe. Most poor children learned through apprenticeship and had no formal schooling at all. Those who did go to elementary school were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Learning consisted of memorizing, which was stimulated by whipping. The first “basic textbook,” The New England Primer, was America’s own contribution to education.

Used from 1690 until the beginning of the 19th century, its purpose was to teach both religion and reading. The child learning the letter a, for example, also learned that “In Adam’s fall, We sinned all. ” As in Europe, then, the schools in the colonies were strongly influenced by religion. This was particularly true of the schools in the New England area, which had been settled by Puritans and other English religious dissenters. Like the Protestants of the Reformation, who established vernacular elementary schools in Germany in the 16th century, the Puritans sought to make education universal.

They took the first steps toward government-supported universal education in the colonies. In 1642, Puritan Massachusetts passed a law requiring that every child be taught to read. And, in 1647, it passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act,” so named because its purpose was to defeat Satan’s attempts to keep men, through an inability to read, from the knowledge of the Scriptures. The law required every town of 50 or more families to establish an elementary school and every town of 100 or more families to maintain a grammar school as well. Puritan or not, virtually all of the colonial schools had clear-cut moral purposes.

Skills and knowledge were considered important to the degree that they served religious ends and, of course, “trained” the mind. We call it “wisdom of the heart. ” These matters, by definition, are anything that the heart is convinced of… so thoroughly convinced that it over-powers the judgement of the mind. Early schools supplied the students with moral lessons, not just reading, writing and arithmetic. Obviously, the founders saw it necessary to apply these techniques, most likely “feeling” that it was necessary that the students learn these particular values.

Wisdom of the heart had a profound effect of the curriculum of the early schools. As the spirit of science, commercialism, secularism, and individualism quickened in the Western world, education in the colonies was called upon to satisfy the practical needs of seamen, merchants, artisans, and frontiersmen. The effect of these new developments on the curriculum in American schools was more immediate and widespread than its effect in European schools. Practical content was soon in competition with religious concerns.

The academy that Benjamin Franklin helped found in 1751 was the first of a growing number of secondary schools that sprang up in competition with the Latin schools. Franklin’s academy continued to offer the humanist-religious curriculum, but it also brought education closer to the needs of everyday life by teaching such courses as history, geography, merchant accounts, geometry, algebra, surveying, modern languages, navigation, and astronomy. These subjects were more practical, seeing as how industry and business were driving forces in the creation of the United States.

Religion classes could not support a family or pay the debts. By the mid-19th century this new diversification in the curriculum characterized virtually all American secondary education. America came into its own, educationally, with the movement toward state-supported, secular free schools for all children, which began in the 1820s with the common (elementary) school. The movement gained incentive in 1837 when Massachusetts established a state board of education and appointed the lawyer and politician Horace Mann (1796-1859) as its secretary.

One of Mann’s many reforms was the improvement of the quality of teaching by the establishment of the first public normal (teacher-training) schools in the United States. State after state followed Massachusetts’ example until, by the end of the 19th century, the common-school system was firmly established. It was the first rung of what was to develop into the American educational ladder. After the common school had been accepted, people began to urge that higher education, too, be tax supported.

As early as 1821, the Boston School Committee established the English Classical School (later the English High School), which was the first public secondary school in the United States. By the end of the century, such secondary schools had begun to outnumber the private academies. The original purpose of the American high school was to allow all children to extend and enrich their common-school education. With the establishment of the land-grant colleges after 1862, the high school also became a preparation for college; the step by which students who had begun at the lowest rung of the educational ladder might reach the highest.

In 1873, when the kindergarten became part of the St. Louis, Mo. school system, there was a hint that, in time, a lower rung might be added. Practicality allowed this change in the high school system. Schools now needed to ready the students for college — an even higher form of education — instead of preparing them to immediately enter the work force. America’s educational ladder was unique. Where public school systems existed in European countries such as France and Germany, they were dual systems.

When a child of the lower and middle classes finished his elementary schooling, he could go on to a vocational or technical school. The upper-class child often did not attend the elementary school but was instead tutored until he was about 9 years old and could enter a secondary school, generally a Latin grammar school. The purpose of this school was to prepare him for the university, from which he might well emerge as one of the potential leaders of his country. Instead of two separate and distinct educational systems for separate and distinct classes, the United States provided one system open to everyone… istinctly egalitarian idea.

As in mid-19th-century Europe, women were slowly gaining educational ground in the United States. “Female academies” established by such pioneers as Emma Willard (1787-1870) and Catharine Beecher (1800-78) prepared the way for secondary education for women. In 1861, Vassar, the first real college for women, was founded. Even earlier, in 1833, Oberlin College was founded as a coeducational college, and in 1837, four women began to study there. In the mid-19th century there was yet another change in education.

The secondary-school curriculum, that had been slowly expanding since the founding of the academies in the mid-18th century, virtually exploded. But the voice of practicality cried out again. A new society, complicated by the latest discoveries in the physical and biological sciences and the rise of industrialism and capitalism, called for more and newer kinds of knowledge. By 1861 as many as 73 subjects were being offered by the Massachusetts secondary schools. People still believed that the mind could be “trained,” but they now thought that science could do a better job than the classics could.

The result was a curriculum that was virtually saturated with scientific instruction. The mid-19th-century knowledge explosion also modestly affected some of the common schools, which expanded their curriculum to include such courses as science and nature study. The content of instruction in the common school, beyond which few students went, consisted of the material in a relatively small number of books: assorted arithmetic, history, and geography texts, Webster’s American Spelling Book, and two new books that appeared in 1836 the “First” and “Second” in the series of McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers.

Whereas The New England Primer admonished children against sin, the stories and poems in the readers pressed for the moral virtues. Countless children were required to memorize such admonitions as “Work while you work, play while you play. One thing each time, that is the way. ” In the early days, the common schools consisted of one room where one teacher taught pupils ranging in age from 6 to about 13 and sometimes older. The teacher instructed the children separately, not as a group. The good teacher had a strong right arm and an unshakable determination to cram information into his pupils.

Once the fight to provide free education for all children had been won, educators turned their attention to the quality of that education. To find out more about learning and the learning process, American schools looked to Europe. In the 1860s, they discovered, and for about 20 years were influenced, by Pestalozzi. His belief was that the goal of education should be the natural development of the individual child, and that educators should focus on the development of the child rather than on memorization of subject matter that he or she was unable to understand.

Pestalozzi’s school also mirrored the idea that learning begins with firsthand observation of an object and moves gradually toward the remote and abstract realm of words and ideas. The teacher’s job was to guide, not distort, the natural growth of the child by selecting his experiences and then directing those experiences toward the realm of ideas. The general effect on the common schools was to shift the emphasis from memorization of abstract facts to the firsthand observation of real objects. Pestalozzi’s diminishing influence roughly coincided with the rapid expansion of the cities.

In the world we live in today a person can almost choose any college or university they want to to continue their education upon graduation from high school. It really doesn’t matter if it is a four year, two year, or technical school, there is a school for any person in any major. What draws a person to attend one certain kind of school compared to another? In this case why is there an increase in Black students attending Black colleges in the past decade?

One might say, “Well how can you tell that more students are getting into these colleges, rather than these schools accepting an increased number of students each year? ” These are all important questions to ask, and there are numerous reasons and causes for schools to increase the number of students they allow and the number of students wanting to attend these colleges. I have an older brother and an older sister who both attend a historically black college (HBCU), Central State University in Wlberforce, Ohio. I have always had a lifelong dream of attending an HBCU.

In fact I was accepted to both Virginia Union in Richmond and North Carolina A&T in Greensboro before I was accepted into Wright State University. My main reason for wanting to attend these schools was the history that they have and the way they made me feel when I went for visits. Those are my personal reasons for wanting to attend these schools, but there are more than personal reasons people are starting to have a higher interest in attending these schools. For the past three years my church back home in Columbus has held an annual Black College Tour.

It is designed to garner the interest of the young people at my church and all around Columbus in HBCU’s. I was a student the first year and a chaperone the last two. In visiting these schools one can find that the administration at these colleges and universities do anything they can to get you admitted to these schools. Almost all of them are rated among the best schools in the nation, too. These are no small time schools. Some students are finding it easier to go to HBCU’s because of the recent Supreme Court rulings on Affirmative Action.

They feel that it will be harder for them to have an equal chance of being accepted to non Black colleges and universities. Most of those people don’t want to put up with all the mess that goes on in those universities today, where even still, in 1997, people are admitted because of physical appearances and not mental capabilities (“Straight Talk” 122 123). Speaking in those terms people just do not want to deal with downright racism. Some HBCU’s in areas with lots of non Black colleges usually have increased enrollment due to past histories and events that happened at the schools.

An example was in Florida in 1988. Incidents of racism on the major White college campuses caused a 19 percent increase at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, another HBCU. It was recorded as the largest increase in enrollment of any of the colleges in the state. Of the 1,876 coeds in the system, 1,327 were enrolled at Florida A&M, while the other universities enrolled the rest (“Racism” 22). Even now Florida A&M has increased enrollment at the school. They reported about 100 more freshman in this year’s class than last year’s (Geraghty A46).

There are some students who are starting to attend HBCU’s because of their feeling of deprivation of black culture in their lives. In an article in The Black Collegian last year, a young man, only referring to himself as “The Invisible Man” to readers, wrote to the editor about attending an HBCU after having gone to predominantly White schools all of his life. He chose to attend a Black school because, “I felt very intimidated by my ignorance of Black history, culture, language, and everything else that I have missed in my previous education” (qtd. in Parker 21).

After attending his first semester in school, “Invisible Man” found he was what he called a “Cultural Zombie. ” He chose to stay at the school to educate himself about the culture that he was left in the cold by his family. He says his family is Black, but never emphasized being black and the culture that comes with it. One thing he say’s he has learned from his unnamed school is who he is and his role as an African American male (Parker 21). The one main cause for increased enrollment in HBCU”s is the attention students get from people they feel understand them.

Most Black colleges have that “hospitality factor” that a person can”t get on a bigger campus. Even the bigger Black universities recognize this helps students achieve better. Black students are beginning to realize that the students who attend these colleges display greater gains in academic achievement, higher rates of Bachelor’s Degree attainment, greater social integration, and higher occupational aspirations than those Black students who attend predominantly White institutions.

Blacks at HBCU”s report being accepted, encouraged, and engaged in all aspects of campus life, unlike Black students on White campuses, who report often feeling alienated and marginal (McDonough 10). An example of the “hospitality factor” I referred to earlier is from a tiny Black school in east Texas called Jarvis Christian School. In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pam Taylor, a senior at the school said, “If your discouraged and you don’t know if you can keep going your teachers are there to pick you up” (Managan A8).

I’ve got spring fever bad right now, and I can call my teacher and she”ll talk me into getting to class. I can talk to her about anything schoolwork, men, anything,” she continued (Managan A8). It does not happen just when you get there either. Administrators at Tennessee State and Florida A&M say that an important technique in keeping their enrollment numbers up has been to call students who have been admitted and talk to them about what the university has to offer (Geraghty A46).

Even though HBCU’s represent less than 4 percent of all U. S. colleges, they enroll 20 percent of all Black undergraduates and present about 33 percent of all African American Baccalaureate degrees. All of this despite predictions in the 1960’s that improved access at predominantly White schools would indicate the end of HBCU’s. Enrollments at these schools has been consistently up since 1976, and in the period between 1987 1991 alone, Black college enrollment rose about 10,000 students per year (McDonough 10 11).

All of this goes to show that because of social, political, and economic causes in the world today, these figures are tiny compared to what’s projected to happen. And as more and more Black students become aware of what these colleges have to offer them, whether it be personal or financial, some of these predominantly White schools will be aching for Black students, from which we might see the beginning of a new trend, the plan to terminate or try to totally segregate Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Bilingual education has been a controversial issue for over 25 years since the government became involved in 1968. That year President Lyndon Johnson signed Title IIV of the ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) which encouraged schools to establish bilingual education programs. The main debate has been in the political arena between liberals and conservatives and usually stems from where the financial responsibility should lie and how much native language LEP (limited English proficient) students should retain. Because bilingual education is such a heated issue, it is not difficult to find articles on this topic.

In fact, I have found that there is an abundance of written opinions on either side, for bilingual education or against, to support whichever opinion you may acknowledge as your own. At a 1995 conference in Washington, DC, several experts gathered to discuss bilingual education in depth. The speeches given at the conference were compiled into a book, The Failure of Bilingual Education, and cover many different topics relating to bilingual education. Irma N. Guadarrama, a professor of bilingual education at the University of Texas at Houston, was one of the featured speakers.

She was a bilingual education teacher for many years in the public school system in Texas and also has a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Texas, Austin. In her speech, “Realizing Democratic Ideals with Bilingual Education”, Guadarrama attempts to relate bilingual education to democracy. Although the beginning of her article was confusing and difficult to understand, I thought that the majority of 2 Irma’s paper did an excellent job arguing her opinion and counter arguing the opposing opinion in her five main points.

The first couple of pages in Guadarrama’s article attempted to xplain why she believes bilingual education is directly related to democracy. It is difficult for me to describe exactly what she was trying to say because I was so thoroughly confused by her words. She made statements such as, “bilingual education . . . also mirrors democracy in action”, and “we must address . . . it’s political justification in playing an essential role in our democratic society. ” (41) Never in her introductory paragraphs did she fully explain what she meant by these statements or give any support that helped to clarify what she was saying.

In paragraph five, I was completely baffled by her words. She seemed to be trying to define some terms such as cultural democracy, which she said is “freedom of self-expression”, and cultural conformity, which to her was “sacrificing one’s own culture”. She then went on to compare her definitions to other’s opinions, with cultural democracy meaning, “an irresponsible construct that contradicts democratic ideas”, and cultural conformity as “containment within boarders of another’s culture, in which self-expression is inhibited. ” (41) I have no idea what she was talking about.

She expressed herself with large, obscure vocabulary to sound more ntelligent but instead came off as pompous. I found that each paragraph in the first two pages of Guadarrama’s article were very confusing and, instead of appealing to the general public, were written only for other arrogant professors to comprehend. In contrast to the confusing nature of the start of Guadarrama’s speech, I thought that the second part was very well organized and used suitable arguing and counter arguing methods. She broke down each subject by number and proceeded to discuss each topic in depth.

Her first point of discussion was on the research done on bilingual education. She used the counter arguing techniques of acknowledging and refuting perfectly to show the weakness in the 3 opposing argument. She stated that, “opponents of bilingual education still rely on research findings as the main weapon in their efforts to disclaim its legitimacy. However,” she continued, “neither supporters nor opponents of bilingual education are satisfied with the results of the effectiveness of bilingual education research” (42-43).

She then went on to sight specific studies such as Bilingual Education Reform in Massachusetts by Rossell and Baker, and Forked Tongue: The politics of Bilingual Education by Rosalie Porter, that opponents of bilingual education tend to use as support for their opinion. To refute Rossell and Baker’s study, Guadarrama stated that they are “irresponsible and shortsighted (43)” because they used “only circumstantial knowledge (43)”.

In the same vein, Guadarrama said of Porter’s study that “(her) strongest arguments, . . . , are substantiated at an emotional level rather than a factual one. (43) Overall her opinion of bilingual education research was this: “… it’s important to recognize that the serious problem with many empirically- based research designs in bilingual education s their over-reliance on single indices to measure effectiveness, and miss some of the program’s most significant successes, i. e. , the affective gains of students. ” (43) I thought she was successful at poking holes in their methods of research and bringing up sound questions to the validity of their results. The next topic of Guadarrama’s article was on the relationship between learning theory and bilingual education.

This section was probably the weakest of all of her arguments. Although she has some personal experience with bilingual education as a student and a teacher, she had no utside, concrete evidence to support her opinion on this subject. Guadarrama believes that “Native-language-based instruction is aligned with learning theory, and a crucial component of bilingual education, contributes to the pedagogy that encompasses both the students’ culture and language … “. In other words, she believes that non-native speaking 4 students need to be proficient in reading their first language before a second language is introduced.

The problem with her theory is that it takes several more years for students taught in their native language to learn English than for the students who are taught in English. In Rosalie Porter’s speech, The Politics of Bilingual Education Revisited, which was also given at the bilingual education conference, she confirms this idea when she said that “[Complaints over bilingual education are typically voiced in these terms], ‘We have been using native-language teaching for our LEP kids for eight, ten, or twelve years, with bilingual teachers and textbooks, but it is working very poorly.

Our students are not learning English for years . . ‘” (Porter 36). Guadarrama did concede that for bilingual education to be truly effective the teachers must have the proper ducation with adequate knowledge and experience (44). Unfortunately, Guadarrama really had no evidence to support her opinions and therefore, this section’s argument was very weak. Section three, “Understanding the Role Others’ Perspectives of Language Play in Bilingual Education” and four, “Understanding the Basic Premises of Bilingual Education and Beyond”, of Guadarrama’s article, I believe, were successful in using both examples and counter arguing to support and clarify the topics.

Section 3 began with Guadarrama’s opinion that “those who oppose bilingual education, . . . reflect a misconstrued nderstanding of language” and that there are several ways to gain a “better understanding of language and second-language learning” (44). I liked how she used an example from history to prove her point that “people shape the language, not the other way around” (45). She cited information from historians regarding Quebec citizens’ struggle for an “identity” in the 18th century after the English gained domination over the French in North America.

What many observers fail to see,” Guadarrama suggested, “is that people’s identity is not only a way of life but a way of defining oneself in historical terms . . . “(45). I thought that in section four, on the other hand, Guadarrama used the 5 counter arguing technique of refuting successfully when she stated, “The issue is not so much whether students will learn English, because we know they will, but rather whether they will achieve academic success and engage as contributing members of our society in meaningful, productive ways” (45).

These methods of arguing and counter arguing definitely helped clarify her opinion and helped me to follow these topics more effectively. Finally, in the fifth section of this article, Guadarrama brought clarity to her original subject, bilingual education in relation to emocracy. This portion, unlike the introduction, was much more clear especially when she said: “But (bilingual education’s) goals and objections are deeply rooted in the democratic ideals in our institutions of education.

It helps students learn English and facilitates their academic success; it nurtures and promotes bilingualism; it promotes harmony among people by fostering understanding; and in the long run, it cuts government costs because students who receive a meaningful education say in school, graduate from high school, and perhaps even college. Bilingual education affords tudents the opportunity to participate as fully as possible in our democracy. (46)

In this section, she also conceded to the fact that there are still many flaws in implementing many bilingual programs, but she felt that these problems where more closely related to operational aspects rather than philosophy. (46) This last part of Guadarrama’s article brought her opinion into focus for me because of the clear and simple examples she used to support her argument. In conclusion, my main complaint about this article was Guadarrama’s use of large, academic vocabulary in the introduction that made her sound ore pompous than intelligent.

But after wading through her arrogant overture, I thought that her thoughts came across more 6 clearly within her five main points. Also, in the introduction, she seemed to use more personal opinion and conjecture, but as her main points unfolded, she began using examples and statistics as well as her personal, authoritive experience to aid her argument which left me with a better overall perspective and knowledge of her subject. In my opinion, Guadarrama should stick to writing for other academic scholars or , at least, learn to simplify her word choices to appeal to a broader audience.

With Hispanics making up more than fifty percent of the language minority population of the United States (cited in Winster, Diaz, Espinosa, & Rodriguez, 1999), Spanish remains the most prevalent target language in U. S. bilingual programs Christian, 1996). There are more than thirty million language minority individuals that reside in the United States, with an estimated projection of forty million by the end of the century (Fitzgerald, 1993). Christian (1996) indicates that there is a growing concern for the target language maintenance and development.

With English being as powerful and ominant as it is, the minority language is fighting for its very survival especially with adolescent students. The students must negotiate between their bilingual system and other complex systems such as peer interactions, self-esteem, and the education system itself as a whole to keep the minority language alive (Soto, 1992). Societal attitudes towards two languages by native English speakers are attributed to the lack of progress in Spanish (Graham & Brown, 1996). The debate about the benefits of bilingual education in the United States has continued for more than twenty years

During this time the focus has been to help those students identified as being L. E. P. or limited in English proficiency by obtaining the best programs that will help them succeed in school (Medina & Escamilla, 1994 ). One of the major sources of controversy in the field of bilingual education is when to move students into English-language instruction ( Gersten & Woodward, 1995 ), and which types of programs with which types of children are most effective in facilitating English language acquisition and/or native language maintenance (August & Hakusta, 1997; Garcia et al, 1995; Hakusta & Gould. 987; cited n Winster. Diaz. Espinosa. & Rodriguez. 1999).

Two-way bilingual programs The earliest two-way programs began in the 1960’s and 1970’s. “Immersion programs were a radical educational experiment when they were first introduced” (Genesse, 1994). It has only been over the past decade that there has been greater interest in the two-way immersion model. The increasing interest in the two-way immersion model is most likely due to the convergence of bilingual education research. It has indicated that extended native language development has positive educational outcomes for language minority students.

Research on the most effective forms of bilingual education (usually in terms of English achievement) suggests that two-way programs may be the best. Two-way bilingual education has been described in a National study as “the program with the highest long-term academic success” (Thomas & Collier, 1997, p. 52). “Two-way bilingual education programs show strong potential for high academic achievement by lessening social distance and unequal social status relations between majority and minority language students”(Gonzalez & Maez. 95).

The students’ success in these programs is undoubtedly due to a number of factors. These include opportunities for linguistic minority students to assume strong peer leadership roles in the classroom, an emphasis on grade- level academic instruction in both languages, sustained support for and use of multicultural curricula, and opportunities for non-English-speaking parents to form close partnerships with the school staff as well as with other parents

Students are learning through two languages in programs that aim to develop dual language proficiency along with academic achievement. Because the two-way model promotes and language minority students in the same classroom, it has begun to receive attention of the national. state. and local levels as an effective way to educate language minority and majority students Lindholm, 1992; Christian, 1996).

My own philosophy of education is rather difficult for me to explain. There are many parts of our educational system that I disagree with. The problem is that I see far too many problems, yet offer few answers. Todays educational systems seem so trendy and political. It almost seems like we should not get comfortable with any one way of doing things because policies and procedures change so often. My own philosophy is one that many people have heard of, If its not broken, then dont fix it!. This is simple, Upon reading some of the different philosophical views towards education, I ound many really good ideas.

Each philosophy is presented very attractively. And why not? The people who set forth these particular ideas were very passionate about what they believed in. Unfortunately, we could all debate about the different philosophical views of education until we are blue in the face. This still doesnt actually make any one opinion, better than any of the others. We all have opinions, what we need is common ground between them. Hopefully, that is what my educational philosophy stands for. The metaphysics, or nature of reality, of my philosophy starts with the subjects we study in school. Subjects should be functional to todays world.

Our educational system is far more diverse today than it has ever been, and our subject matter should reflect that. The reality of the subjects studied in school, should also reflect upon the reality in each students environment. Reality can change, because environments change. Textbooks and literature become somewhat obsolete after a while because our culture changes so rapidly. That is not to say that classic pieces of literature are not of use in the classroom, but each literary product presented in the classroom should hold some information that is elatively useful for all of the students.

When considering metaphysics in the classroom, I believe that religion is something for outside of the classroom. There are far too many religious beliefs in the world to accommodate all of them, so that is an area best left alone. This leaves plenty of time for other areas of development. If it is the wish of a family to have religion addressed in the classroom, then there are certain specialized schools that do just that. I believe it is the responsibility of the church to educate their youth in these areas. Lastly, writing skills are important to the metaphysics of my educational hilosophy.

Writing is a necessity in order to accurately document events and opinions. Distinguishing the difference between fact and fiction can be quite difficult. But a strong foundation of writing skills make identifying reality, that much easier. The epistemology, or nature of knowledge, in my philosophy is much like that of the pragmatists. I believe that interaction with the environment is a key part of education. Education should extend outside of the classroom. Life is a constant learning process in itself. If we compared how much time we learn in classrooms to the amount we learn out f them, there is no comparison.

If an environmental science class is learning how to use a compass in the woods, then that is exactly what they should do, literally. Another part of my epistemology is problem solving. Once again I find myself siding with the pragmatist view. There are many people who are book smart, but not so many of those people can practically apply that knowledge. Todays system praises short term memory. Far too many subjects are taught and then forgotten. If we desire to retain information then it must be useful and interesting to us. Knowledge has definitely taken a ack seat to the test score.

It is very possible to obtain an A, in a subject but not actually learn anything about it. Todays society values grades, not knowledge. They are The axiology, or the nature of values, is also a very sensitive area to touch upon. Moral values, for the most part, should be taught at home. Ethics are an important part of education (plagiarism, dishonesty, etc. ). If ethical values are going to be worthwhile, then they must be part of life outside of the classroom as well. If the gap between ethics outside of school differs greatly from that of ethics inside the classroom, the learning rocess can be greatly hindered.

A perfect example, in my mind, is the recent tragedy at Columbine high school in Colorado. The students who went into school with their guns smoking, were obviously far beyond ethical principles, and did not know of any other The aesthetics of values is a much more simple area of education than morals. This should be entirely up to the student. If a student has seriously considered the material presented, then perhaps appreciation for the beauty of nature and art is possible. The teacher is simply a facilitator in this situation.

Teachers must also be careful not to ead students in any certain direction with their appreciation, but rather let the students Society as a whole will lead students in a certain direction, because it is society as a whole that decides what is right or wrong. We learn right from wrong through trial and error. Once again I seem to side with the pragmatists in believing that values depend on all of the variables present during that particular time or setting. If a person cannot conform to the norms of society when it comes to morals, or any other area, then that person will end up being an outcast or undesirable.

I think that natural consequences should be the penalty for not having morals. Either you conformingly exist, or you cease The logic of my philosophy is simply to approach education logically. For example, it does not make sense that students must pass a comprehensive exam in Massachusetts in order to graduate from high school. I cant wait to hear about the student who aces the SATs, but flunks the MCAS. Besides, there is no way to test and measure life skills, which are a large part of a successful life after high school. Students should develop those skills throughout the course of their lives.

Logic is also a key part of communication. Education should help students develop a strong verbal and written competency, as these are important parts of real life. It would be logical for school to be more like real life in order not to create some kind of sheltered fantasy land (schools) in which students hide from the world. Strong communication skills will help the progress of society. And that is one of the important roles of school, isnt it? It prepares our youth to be productive and successful members of Lastly, school must be logical in order for students to completely invest in it.

If tudents do not see the need or usefulness for education, then they will be less likely to benefit from it. Too many students drop out of school because the problems in their lives do not seemingly have the chance of being solved with or without an education, so In conclusion, we as a society must make school an enriching experience for our children. We can do this by supporting the schools and contributing to the process of bettering lives outside of school. When there are less distractions outside of the classroom, there are in fact more learning opportunities presented within it, for everyone.

Education is the act or process of providing knowledge skills or competence by a formal course of instruction or training. Through out history societies have sought to educate their people to produce goods and services, to respond effectively and creatively to their world, and to satisfy their curiosity and aesthetic impulses. To achieve reliable knowledge and to think systematically. Over the course of human history education has appeared in many forms, both foreclosed and informal. Major thinkers have always recognized the educational value of intellectual exploration and of concrete experimentation.

Most societies have attempted to standardized the behavior of their members. These societies have apprenticeship systems by which the young have learned to imitate the beliefs and behaviors of a given group. Teachers have worked within schools of thought cults, monasteries and other types of organizations to shape desired convictions, knowledge and behavior. Such philosophical and religious leaders as the Buddha, Confucious, Pythagoras, Jesus, Moses, Muhammad and Karl Marx instructed their disciplines through informal education.

Turkish State and Turkish Society give great importance to the education since the Turkish Republic was established in 1923. The fall of Ottoman Empire at the end of the first world war and the foundation of the republic after the successful conclusion of the war of independence are two important factors which have made the existence of the new Turkish Society possible. The great desire of this society which is adopted in the social and economic fields to the general life conditions of western civilizations is to work for the benefit of mankind while enjoying all the privileges of civilized life within the family of Nations.

In order to reach this goal, it has above all been necessary to establish an educational system in all its stages in such a way as to diffuse its light to all classes of the population. Bases of the Turkish Education leans to the last years of the Ottoman Empire. The road towards modern education was charted by Selim III and Mahmud II and was followed with accelerated speed by their successors.

In the 1876 constitution, educational reforms had been mentioned for the first time EFor education continued to be regarded as the necessary foundation for the reorganization of the empire and the creation of a cadre of new leaders to maintain itI As one contemporary writer put it EThe solution of the Esick manI was not through extermination but through educationI. Educational reorganization and westernization were seen as a necessary condition in the general movement towards the social and political modernization of the Ottoman State and Society.

The Tanzimat Period was characteristics by attempts to set up a modern administrative framework and a grade system of schools different in many respects from traditional institutional arrangements. Except his trial to bring back autocracy to the Ottoman State he was successful he had faith in the value of education. The constitution of 1876 provided that all schools should be under government supervision and the first stage of education should be compulsory under the young Turk regime another attempt was made to reform the system of primary education.

In 1913 a new law enforced, aimed at public support at primary schools and better organization of the program of study IProvisory Primary Education Law (Tedrisati iptidai Kanunu) consists compulsory and free six year education in public schools and limitation of class size not more than fifty pupils. High institutions such as Galatasaray, Daruccafaka, Mlkiye and istanbul University was established in this period. The war years were hesitation period for education like the other institutions. Budget of every institution were being transferred to war.

After the war in embarking upon the task of building a new nation , Ataturk and his Associates coceived of education as the most important foundation. In the emerging ideology of Ataturkism, education was inevitably bound up with political , economic and cultural independence and with breaking the shackles of traditional beliefs and outlooks; it was the means of creating national feelings , creating the consensus necessary to sustain a free national state training new Turkish leaders and paving the way towards a dynamic and modern society .

Knowledge an science were regarded as power and as the leverage in transforming and uplifting the entire society. Ataturk made several statements on the important role assigned to education. In 1921 , he said that Iour national system of education should be something different from the old and something that grow out of our own nation. A national genius can only be developed through our national culture. I Mustafa Kemal Ataturk placed the future of republic squarely in the hands of the schools an the younger generation ; whom he expected ever to preserve and defend the national independence of the Turkish Republic.

On the March 3 1924 ‘Tevhid-I Tedrisat Kanunu’ (law of unification of institutions) was declared. Which provided that all educational institutions are able to be placed under the control of the Ministry of Education. This eased to control the religious schools. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk layed the foundation of Turkish Educational System by reorganizing the educational system . ( Primary school , Middle School, Lycee . Technical and vocational Schools. ). In 1928 Latin alphabet had been accepted and afterwards national schools was established. Every body between ages 16 and 45 attend to these schools.

Village Institutions had been established by the head of Ministry IHasan Ali YcelI but was closed by the government saying that village institutes were training communist. After the death of Atatrk development of education slow down till the military makes coup detat after 1960Is by the encouragement of the military new reading and writing mobilization started and the final point reached in the educational reform is the compulsory eight year education. Turkey entered the 21st century depending on the calendar year but the same cannot be said for education.

Education is still in the 20th century. This situation is because of the problems that Turkish Education System faces. These problems can be solved by some precautions. First of all population of Turkey is 70 million which is quiet much compared to the western countries and it is still increasing however in western countries population rates are decreasing. For example in Greece in 1986 population was 10 million and today they are still 10 million, This situation ease education in western countries .

The young population is educated in good conditions and the excess budget is used for the education of adults and as a result the education the education level of the whole population increases which is an indicator of the development of a country. Today in Turkey not every youth is going to school. The young population rate is very high besides that immigration to cities increase the demand of education which affect the quality of education. In order to solve the problem of population the most valid method is wide spreading family planning to every part of the country.

By this method there can be a decrease in the rates of population increase in Turkey. Industrialization of the provinces can be another method which can reduce the immigration rate and change the way of immigration from cities back to villages. Opening the village institutions again (which were closed in 1940Is) can contribute to the industrialization of the provinces. Secondly, Education System of Turkey is not well organized basic education (which is seen as the most important part of education by the experts )is insufficient, The type of system based on memorisation bring success for only the exam period not for his or her all life.

The mass student(Which reaches millions today)waiting for entering university is another disgrace for the Turkish Education system. One other problem of education system is the limited profession education . Importance of Profession education can be seen when comparing Japan and Turkey. Both countries were in very bad conditions after the World Wars. Japan was even worse. When we compare the two countries today we see that Japan is much more developed than Turkey and controlling the electronic and automotive industries as a result of the giving importance to profession education.

In order to solve the problems of Education System a reform must be enlivened in basic education by taking reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as prototypes. The reforms must cover all the teachers and employees. Besides that new universities must be built in order to lessen the amount of mass student waiting for entering university. Expecting from the state to built universities would be merciless business man should help the state economically but the restricted budget of the government cannot be an excuse for not building universities because universities are much more necessary than bridges ,government buildings or nuclear weapons.

Thirdly, the economic crisis that paralysis every institution in Turkey makes the situation of education more difficult. Government hardly pays the salaries of teachers in addition to that expose to protests because of the low salaries. The government hardly paying salaries does not allot any budget for the restoration and improvement of the old technology with the new ones, In the east part of Turkey there are still villages in which they use materials such as maps, desks etc. which was are more than 50 years old.

One other factor is the poor families which are unable to have their Child’s education because of poverty and this situation creates an unequality of education because in other hand wealthy families are sending their children to private schools and courses. In order to solve the economical problem government should find new resources and this may happen by decreasing the budget of army, sports ministry etc. Lastly terror is another problem that affects the quality of education most of the lecturers do not want to go to East of Turkey by saying that there is terror and they do not have the life security.

In reality they are right everyday in newspapers and television programs people see tens of people dying in one day terrorists bombing schools, killing teachers. If government is not effective on stopping the terror in the east the only solution can be making extra payments for teachers that are going east. In conclusion Turkish Education has many problems in connection to the other problems in other institutions such as terror, population increase and economic trouble but these problems are not impossible to solve.

Education is the act or process of providing knowledge skills or competence by a formal course of instruction or training. Through out history societies have sought to educate their people to produce goods and services, to respond effectively and creatively to their world, and to satisfy their curiosity and aesthetic impulses. To achieve reliable knowledge and to think systematically. Over the course of human history education has appeared in many forms, both foreclosed and informal. Major thinkers have always recognized the educational value of intellectual exploration and of concrete experimentation.

Most societies have attempted to standardized the behavior of their members. These societies have apprenticeship systems by which the young have learned to imitate the beliefs and behaviors of a given group. Teachers have worked within schools of thought cults, monasteries and other types of organizations to shape desired convictions, knowledge and behavior. Such philosophical and religious leaders as the Buddha, Confucious, Pythagoras, Jesus, Moses, Muhammad and Karl Marx instructed their disciplines through informal education.

Turkish State and Turkish Society give great importance to the education since the Turkish Republic was established in 1923. The fall of Ottoman Empire at the end of the first world war and the foundation of the republic after the successful conclusion of the war of independence are two important factors which have made the existence of the new Turkish Society possible. The great desire of this society which is adopted in the social and economic fields to the general life conditions of western civilizations is to work for the benefit of mankind while enjoying all the privileges of civilized life within the family of Nations.

In order to reach this goal, it has above all been necessary to establish an educational system in all its stages in such a way as to diffuse its light to all classes of the population. Bases of the Turkish Education leans to the last years of the Ottoman Empire. The road towards modern education was charted by Selim III and Mahmud II and was followed with accelerated speed by their successors.

In the 1876 constitution, educational reforms had been mentioned for the first time For education continued to be regarded as the necessary foundation for the reorganization of the empire and the creation of a cadre of new leaders to maintain it As one contemporary writer put it The solution of the sick man was not through extermination but through education. Educational reorganization and westernization were seen as a necessary condition in the general movement towards the social and political modernization of the Ottoman State and Society.

The Tanzimat Period was characteristics by attempts to set up a modern administrative framework and a grade system of schools different in many respects from traditional institutional arrangements. Except his trial to bring back autocracy to the Ottoman State he was successful he had faith in the value of education. The constitution of 1876 provided that all schools should be under government supervision and the first stage of education should be compulsory under the young Turk regime another attempt was made to reform the system of primary education.

In 1913 a new law enforced, aimed at public support at primary schools and better organization of the program of study Provisory Primary Education Law (Tedrisat ptidai Kanunu) consists compulsory and free six year education in public schools and limitation of class size not more than fifty pupils. High institutions such as Galatasaray, Daruafaka, Mlkiye and stanbul University was established in this period. The war years were hesitation period for education like the other institutions. Budget of every institution were being transferred to war.

After the war in embarking upon the task of building a new nation , Ataturk and his Associates coceived of education as the most important foundation. In the emerging ideology of Ataturkism, education was inevitably bound up with political , economic and cultural independence and with breaking the shackles of traditional beliefs and outlooks; it was the means of creating national feelings , creating the consensus necessary to sustain a free national state training new Turkish leaders and paving the way towards a dynamic and modern society .

Knowledge an science were regarded as power and as the leverage in transforming and uplifting the entire society. Ataturk made several statements on the important role assigned to education. In 1921 , he said that our national system of education should be something different from the old and something that grow out of our own nation. A national genius can only be developed through our national culture. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk placed the future of republic squarely in the hands of the schools an the younger generation ; whom he expected ever to preserve and defend the national independence of the Turkish Republic.

On the March 3 1924 `Tevhid-I Tedrisat Kanunu` (law of unification of institutions) was declared. Which provided that all educational institutions are able to be placed under the control of the Ministry of Education. This eased to control the religious schools. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk layed the foundation of Turkish Educational System by reorganizing the educational system . ( Primary school , Middle School, Lycee . Technical and vocational Schools. ). In 1928 Latin alphabet had been accepted and afterwards national schools was established.

Every body between ages 16 and 45 attend to these schools. Village Institutions had been established by the head of Ministry Hasan Ali Ycel but was closed by the government saying that village institutes were training communist. After the death of Atatrk development of education slow down till the military makes coup detat after 1960s by the encouragement of the military new reading and writing mobilization started and the final point reached in the educational reform is the compulsory eight year education.

Turkey entered the 21st century depending on the calendar year but the same cannot be said for education. Education is still in the 20th century. This situation is because of the problems that Turkish Education System faces. These problems can be solved by some precautions. First of all population of Turkey is 70 million which is quiet much compared to the western countries and it is still increasing however in western countries population rates are decreasing. For example in Greece in 1986 population was 10 million and today they are still 10 million, This situation ease education in western countries .

The young population is educated in good conditions and the excess budget is used for the education of adults and as a result the education the education level of the whole population increases which is an indicator of the development of a country. Today in Turkey not every youth is going to school. The young population rate is very high besides that immigration to cities increase the demand of education which affect the quality of education. In order to solve the problem of population the most valid method is wide spreading family planning to every part of the country.

By this method there can be a decrease in the rates of population increase in Turkey. Industrialization of the provinces can be another method which can reduce the immigration rate and change the way of immigration from cities back to villages. Opening the village institutions again (which were closed in 1940s) can contribute to the industrialization of the provinces. Secondly, Education System of Turkey is not well organized basic education (which is seen as the most important part of education by the experts )is insufficient, The type of system based on memorisation bring success for only the exam period not for his or her all life.

The mass student(Which reaches millions today)waiting for entering university is another disgrace for the Turkish Education system. One other problem of education system is the limited profession education . Importance of Profession education can be seen when comparing Japan and Turkey. Both countries were in very bad conditions after the World Wars. Japan was even worse. When we compare the two countries today we see that Japan is much more developed than Turkey and controlling the electronic and automotive industries as a result of the giving importance to profession education.

In order to solve the problems of Education System a reform must be enlivened in basic education by taking reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as prototypes. The reforms must cover all the teachers and employees. Besides that new universities must be built in order to lessen the amount of mass student waiting for entering university. Expecting from the state to built universities would be merciless business man should help the state economically but the restricted budget of the government cannot be an excuse for not building universities because universities are much more necessary than bridges ,government buildings or nuclear weapons.

Thirdly, the economic crisis that paralysis every institution in Turkey makes the situation of education more difficult. Government hardly pays the salaries of teachers in addition to that expose to protests because of the low salaries. The government hardly paying salaries does not allot any budget for the restoration and improvement of the old technology with the new ones, In the east part of Turkey there are still villages in which they use materials such as maps, desks etc. which was are more than 50 years old.

One other factor is the poor families which are unable to have their Child’s education because of poverty and this situation creates an unequality of education because in other hand wealthy families are sending their children to private schools and courses. In order to solve the economical problem government should find new resources and this may happen by decreasing the budget of army, sports ministry etc. Lastly terror is another problem that affects the quality of education most of the lecturers do not want to go to East of Turkey by saying that there is terror and they do not have the life security.

In reality they are right everyday in newspapers and television programs people see tens of people dying in one day terrorists bombing schools, killing teachers. If government is not effective on stopping the terror in the east the only solution can be making extra payments for teachers that are going east. In conclusion Turkish Education has many problems in connection to the other problems in other institutions such as terror, population increase and economic trouble but these problems are not impossible to solve.

English only–sink or swim? Yeah right! Instead of English Only Advocates worrying about bilingual education cost in our school system, why not take advantage of the skills our ethnic minorities possess to move our economy forward? They are obviously not thinking clearly, because the benefit of bilinguals, significantly outweigh the bad. To deny our youth the opportunity for upward mobility and skill to become more marketable in a worldwide capacity is inhumane. They believe bilinguals threaten to sap our sense of national identity and divide us along ethnic lines.

They also fear that any government recognition of minority languages sends the wrong message to immigrants, encouraging them to believe they can live in the U. S. A. without learning English or conforming to The American way. That is an overt, racist, and paranoid view, dont you think? The most significant issues that support bilingual education for students ability to assimilate in the mainstream culture are, the development of students linguistic resources and preserve their cultural heritage, contributions to the American economy, and diversity.

The development of a students language and preservation of their culture is essential for the upward mobility of todays youth. There always have been some immigrants who viewed themselves explicitly as the preserver and savior of their languages and heritages. Since the late 1800s, ethnic minorities in America have been consistently characterized as culturally inferior. Their language right has consistently been the subject of political review. Politicians do not have (PCC(SW) Taylor/16603/Mr. Jones/Small Group 2/23 Feb 00 the right to force people to master their language and values just because they are the dominant society.

They should encourage and support students to the attainment of bilingual or multilingual skills. They should also consider that students coming from homes where two or more languages are used will face difficulty in applying while in the school environment. The fact that so few Americans command any other language than English is largely a result of educational failure and cultural inadequacies. The American economy will benefit from bilingual education because historically multilingual personnel are smarter, academic skills are sharper, and their contributions to society are immeasurable.

English is the one language that offers the biggest market, the largest pool of talent, and the greatest probability of being able to communicate with anyone on the planet. Bilingual education is a tool for better education that children whose primary language is not English learn more easily. Industry and Information Technology dance to English lyrics. Students will have no future in the Information Technology field if they cannot command English as an effective medium of communication. Furthermore, good bilingual programs are about more than learning a language.

They should be based on a respect for diversity and multiculturalism, and parents and community must be essential partners. (Rethinking schools Vol 1. 13, #2. ). Over 80% of todays Internet WEB pages, databases and other enhancing computer programs are in English. It is in the best interest of all countries to ensure their children are bilingual and computer literate. Diversity in todays society is essential to the success of this nation. The lack of bilingual personnel has most recently created major problems for U. S. security agencies.

Specifically, Of the more than 500,000 American troops deployed to the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, the Department of Defense was able to identify just 45 U. S. military personnel with any Iraqi language backgrounds, and only 5 of these were trained in intelligence operations (James Crawfords homepage). The statement above is a perfect example of why it is important to possess the ability to read, write and speak in foreign languages. Those who oppose such diversity really must take timeout to reevaluate their philosophy.

Their views are closed minded, stupid, and most importantly serve to cripple this nations ability to remain a super power. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that multilingual personnel are generally smarter than those who only speak one language. They possess the intelligence to mix in a wide variety of cultures and share their experience with America. So I say again, why not support bilingual education? Bilingual education gives jobs and local power to members of the non-English speaking community. It also reinforces childrens identification with members of their own ethnic group.

The abilities of multilingual personnel should be exploited at all costs. I personally favor maintenance and enrichment of bilingual education. Unfortunately, the opposition of bilingualism has a great influence to change the political viewpoint. Overall we discussed the development of students linguistic resources and preserve their cultural heritage, contributions to the American economy, and diversity. As Equal Opportunity Advisors, we must exhaust every effort to ensure our students regardless of ethnicity are afforded the opportunity to explore preserve their cultural heritage.

Additionally we must push bilingualism to assimilate ethnic minority personnel into the mainstream of society. In other words, it would not impose a substantial benefit on a child to learn subject matter in two languages? No matter what the theoretical conclusions may be on bilingual education, ethnic minorities should be individually consulted and have the final word in deciding for themselves. They should be afforded the opportunity to judge for themselves, if it is in their best interest and the future to take advantage of the possibility of bilingual education for their children.

We spent a great deal of time discussing learning styles during our first class periods specifically as relating to adult learning. The focus of this class as evidenced by the title College Teaching is geared towards the teaching of college students who typically are going to be in the under-30 age bracket. As potential college-level and adult education teachers, I believe we also need to consider the particular motivations of the college students in addition to their learning styles. The motivations may be very different and may not be necessarily age related.

Although one certainly cannot customize the class to accommodate the expectations of all class members I do believe it is necessary to understand these specific motivations. It could be that their attendance is due to simply an interest in the subject, a desire to get away from their normal environment, to meet a work requirement or for professional advancement or they just want the social interaction that an adult learning environment provides. Is it possible that at the higher college levels and graduate levels that the measurement of the amount of learning that took place during the course could be directly related to this motivation?

Seeking to understand this motivation is something that I feel is rarely addressed at the college level and in most adult education environments to which I have been exposed. Perhaps teachers should seek an understanding or at the very least an articulation by the student what his or her expectations are of the class and the teacher and a real assessment by both as to the purpose of the students presence in the class. Once again, I understand that as teachers we cannot always take into account everyones expectations but at the very least we can challenge the students to think about why they are there and what they expect to learn.

In a way this is taking them through the experiential learning cycle prior to the start of the class. The challenge to the students would be to articulate what they expect to do with what they will be learning how they intend to apply the experience of the class they are about to undertake. Perhaps too many times the students come to the classroom with the expectation that the teacher has 100% responsibility to teach the students. There is very little prior thought as to why they are here, what they expect to learn and what they will do with what they learned other than to meet some educational requirement be it degree or work related.

What we as teachers ARE 100% responsible for is understanding how to fully engage our students in the class and then how to apply that understanding. I feel the real key to effective teaching at the college and adult education level is to move them towards taking full responsibility for their own learning. We have to move them towards a high level of self-direction in their own educational process by the empowerment that comes from this full engagement and the acceptance of the responsibility I spoke about.

As evidenced by the activities during our first two class sessions I believe this class will address the idea of engaging the students. We have discussed several tools that can be used to address different learning styles what I think is the overall goal that is being expressed here is that we as teachers become facilitators of learning rather than lecturers. What I have experienced in my brief exposure to adult education in my current job is that the greatest learning may actually take place among the students rather than between student and teacher. The concepts presented so far in this class address this idea of teacher as facilitator.

What I am hearing with the discussions on learning styles and our initial discussions on the purpose of education is that we as teachers must create the appropriate learning environment rather than simply be presenters of material and then quantitative assessors of the intellectual intake. We are hear to facilitate the learning process the actual teaching is done by the students in the classroom. The discussion that is generated by the concepts presented allows the students to think out loud, so to speak, and thus provide them the opportunity to give and receive feedback on how they are processing the information provided by the teacher.

This is where true learning occurs, I believe. That is when the student can be affirmed or confronted about ideas in other words, for true learning to occur the teacher must challenge the students to think by creating an environment that encourages thinking and interaction. Perhaps a measure of a teachers effectiveness is the ratio of how much the teacher talks versus the students. Another thought occurred to me during our first class meetings in which it was mentioned that in our early years we are more concerned with acquisition of skills.

Thus college level teachers tend to present the material and evaluate the learning that occurred based on the content that was presented. I did wonder though whether the notion that younger college students are more concerned with acquisition of skills is the result of what they indeed want or is it that most elementary and secondary education is geared towards that type learning. Is it possible that younger college students have been conditioned to accept that type of teaching style? As young children we are constantly asking Why?. We are questioning the process more than the actual content.

Do we develop teaching methods at that level to address the need to understand why something works the way it does or are we more concerned with filling the young student with content? After all, how can you evaluate how much learning has taken place and thus validate and quantify our effectiveness as teachers if you cannot measure the content level? Maybe as children we are more process-oriented than currently thought but we force them into a particular learning mode by presenting them with a teaching style that is more suited to the teacher than the student.

Are children really more focused on the concrete rather than the abstract or is that the way they have been taught to learn? Perhaps this will be addressed later in the class (or maybe it has been and my antennae were not up! ) but I also wondered whether there is validity in considering if learning styles can also be gender-based. I have heard that studies of early childhood education show that teachers tend to adopt their teaching style to fit preconceived notions of males and females. For example, teachers tend to make girls raise their hands to answer questions while boys are typically allowed to shout them out.

Also there are stereotypes that say boys are good at science and math and girls are good at verbal and reading comprehension skills. In my brief experience in the world of adult learning I have also observed that men tend to be more black/white and right/wrong oriented whereas women are more apt to see the gray areas and the subtleties behind every question. Men understand that there may be a diversity of opinion on issues and even respect everyones right to their opinion but in the end feel that there is only one possible answer to every question.

These differences may very well fit into the learning styles we have already discussed but I do question whether there are differences that need to be explored as it relates to gender. My overall first impression from the class is that I see that we as teachers need to understand the complexity of our responsibility as educators. Full engagement of students is critical to their success and ours. We need to get out of our traditional boxes and notions that teachers only teach. What I am learning is that we must consider student motivations and the way our students process information if we are truly going to be great educators.

In Antiracism, Multiculturalism, and Interracial Community: Three Educational Values for a Multicultural Society, reprinted in Gary E Kessler, Voices of Wisdom: A Multicultural Philosophy Reader, Fourth Edition, (Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 2000, pp25-31), Lawrence A. Blum argues that there are a plurality of values that one would want taught in schools and families, and are essential to a program of value education for a multicultural society (Blum, p25). He supports his argument by identifying the values, which are antiracism, multiculturalism, an interracial community, and creating persons as individuals.

Blums purpose is to clear up any predisposed misconceptions readers may have had about multiculturalism in order to perfect the multicultural society, using the readers as advocates. Blum seems to be targeting an audience of educators who may desire the multicultural society, but are unsure of how to attain it. I do agree with Blums concept on a plan for educating to develop for a multicultural society; however I do not feel as though he understands that it is a much tougher task than just identifying values, because they must be instilled.

The American educator Horace Mann once said: As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated. Education is the process through which people endeavor to pass along to their children their hard-won wisdom and their aspirations for a better world. This process begins shortly after birth, as parents seek to train the infant to behave as their culture demands.

They soon, for instance, teach the child how to turn babbling sounds into language and, through example and precept, they try to instill in the child the attitudes, values, skills, and knowledge that will govern their offspring’s behavior throughout later life. Schooling, or formal education, consists of experiences that are deliberately planned and utilized to help young people learn what adults consider important for them to know and to help teach them how they should respond to choices.

This education has been influenced by three important parts of modern American society: wisdom of the heart, egalitarianism, and practicality… e greatest of these, practicality. In the absence of written records, no one can be sure what education man first provided for his children. Most anthropologists believe, though, that the educational practices of prehistoric times were probably like those of primitive tribes in the 20th century, such as the Australian aborigines and the Aleuts. Formal instruction was probably given just before the child’s initiation into adulthood — the puberty rite — and involved tribal customs and beliefs too complicated to be learned by direct experience.

Children learned most of the skills, duties, customs, and beliefs of the tribe through an informal apprenticeship — by taking part in such adult activities as hunting, fishing, farming, toolmaking, and cooking. In such simple tribal societies, school was not a special place… it was life itself. However, the educational process has changed over the decades, and it now vaguely represents what it was in ancient times, or even in early American society.

While the schools that the colonists established in the 17th century in the New England, Southern, and Middle colonies differed from one another, each reflected a concept of schooling that had been left behind in Europe. Most poor children learned through apprenticeship and had no formal schooling at all. Those who did go to elementary school were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. Learning consisted of memorizing, which was stimulated by whipping. The first basic textbook, The New England Primer, was America’s own contribution to education.

Used from 1690 until the beginning of the 19th century, its purpose was to teach both religion and reading. The child learning the letter a, for example, also learned that In Adam’s fall, We sinned all. As in Europe, then, the schools in the colonies were strongly influenced by religion. This was particularly true of the schools in the New England area, which had been settled by Puritans and other English religious dissenters. Like the Protestants of the Reformation, who established vernacular elementary schools in Germany in the 16th century, the Puritans sought to make education universal.

They took the first steps toward government-supported universal education in the colonies. In 1642, Puritan Massachusetts passed a law requiring that every child be taught to read. And, in 1647, it passed the Old Deluder Satan Act, so named because its purpose was to defeat Satan’s attempts to keep men, through an inability to read, from the knowledge of the Scriptures. The law required every town of 50 or more families to establish an elementary school and every town of 100 or more families to maintain a grammar school as well. Puritan or not, virtually all of the colonial schools had clear-cut moral purposes.

Skills and knowledge were considered important to the degree that they served religious ends and, of course, trained the mind. We call it wisdom of the heart. These matters, by definition, are anything that the heart is convinced of… so thoroughly convinced that it over-powers the judgement of the mind. Early schools supplied the students with moral lessons, not just reading, writing and arithmetic. Obviously, the founders saw it necessary to apply these techniques, most likely feeling that it was necessary that the students learn these particular values. Wisdom of the heart had a profound effect of the curriculum of the early schools.

As the spirit of science, commercialism, secularism, and individualism quickened in the Western world, education in the colonies was called upon to satisfy the practical needs of seamen, merchants, artisans, and frontiersmen. The effect of these new developments on the curriculum in American schools was more immediate and widespread than its effect in European schools. Practical content was soon in competition with religious concerns. The academy that Benjamin Franklin helped found in 1751 was the first of a growing number of secondary schools that sprang up in competition with the Latin schools.

Franklin’s academy continued to offer the humanist-religious curriculum, but it also brought education closer to the needs of everyday life by teaching such courses as history, geography, merchant accounts, geometry, algebra, surveying, modern languages, navigation, and astronomy. These subjects were more practical, seeing as how industry and business were driving forces in the creation of the United States. Religion classes could not support a family or pay the debts. By the mid-19th century this new diversification in the curriculum characterized virtually all American secondary education.

America came into its own, educationally, with the movement toward state-supported, secular free schools for all children, which began in the 1820s with the common (elementary) school. The movement gained incentive in 1837 when Massachusetts established a state board of education and appointed the lawyer and politician Horace Mann (1796-1859) as its secretary. One of Mann’s many reforms was the improvement of the quality of teaching by the establishment of the first public normal (teacher-training) schools in the United States.

State after state followed Massachusetts’ example until, by the end of the 19th century, the common-school system was firmly established. It was the first rung of what was to develop into the American educational ladder. After the common school had been accepted, people began to urge that higher education, too, be tax supported. As early as 1821, the Boston School Committee established the English Classical School (later the English High School), which was the first public secondary school in the United States.

By the end of the century, such secondary schools had begun to outnumber the private academies. The original purpose of the American high school was to allow all children to extend and enrich their common-school education. With the establishment of the land-grant colleges after 1862, the high school also became a preparation for college; the step by which students who had begun at the lowest rung of the educational ladder might reach the highest.

In 1873, when the kindergarten became part of the St. Louis, Mo. hool system, there was a hint that, in time, a lower rung might be added. Practicality allowed this change in the high school system. Schools now needed to ready the students for college — an even higher form of education — instead of preparing them to immediately enter the work force. America’s educational ladder was unique. Where public school systems existed in European countries such as France and Germany, they were dual systems. When a child of the lower and middle classes finished his elementary schooling, he could go on to a vocational or technical school.

The upper-class child often did not attend the elementary school but was instead tutored until he was about 9 years old and could enter a secondary school, generally a Latin grammar school. The purpose of this school was to prepare him for the university, from which he might well emerge as one of the potential leaders of his country. Instead of two separate and distinct educational systems for separate and distinct classes, the United States provided one system open to everyone… a distinctly egalitarian idea. As in mid-19th-century Europe, women were slowly gaining educational ground in the United States.

Female academies established by such pioneers as Emma Willard (1787-1870) and Catharine Beecher (1800-78) prepared the way for secondary education for women. In 1861, Vassar, the first real college for women, was founded. Even earlier, in 1833, Oberlin College was founded as a coeducational college, and in 1837, four women began to study there. In the mid-19th century there was yet another change in education. The secondary-school curriculum, that had been slowly expanding since the founding of the academies in the mid-18th century, virtually exploded.

But the voice of practicality cried out again. A new society, complicated by the latest discoveries in the physical and biological sciences and the rise of industrialism and capitalism, called for more and newer kinds of knowledge. By 1861 as many as 73 subjects were being offered by the Massachusetts secondary schools. People still believed that the mind could be trained, but they now thought that science could do a better job than the classics could. The result was a curriculum that was virtually saturated with scientific instruction.

The mid-19th-century knowledge explosion also modestly affected some of the common schools, which expanded their curriculum to include such courses as science and nature study. The content of instruction in the common school, beyond which few students went, consisted of the material in a relatively small number of books: assorted arithmetic, history, and geography texts, Webster’s American Spelling Book, and two new books that appeared in 1836 the First and Second in the series of McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers.

Whereas The New England Primer admonished children against sin, the stories and poems in the readers pressed for the moral virtues. Countless children were required to memorize such admonitions as Work while you work, play while you play. One thing each time, that is the way. In the early days, the common schools consisted of one room where one teacher taught pupils ranging in age from 6 to about 13 and sometimes older. The teacher instructed the children separately, not as a group. The good teacher had a strong right arm and an unshakable determination to cram information into his pupils.

Once the fight to provide free education for all children had been won, educators turned their attention to the quality of that education. To find out more about learning and the learning process, American schools looked to Europe. In the 1860s, they discovered, and for about 20 years were influenced, by Pestalozzi. His belief was that the goal of education should be the natural development of the individual child, and that educators should focus on the development of the child rather than on memorization of subject matter that he or she was unable to understand.

Pestalozzi’s school also mirrored the idea that learning begins with firsthand observation of an object and moves gradually toward the remote and abstract realm of words and ideas. The teacher’s job was to guide, not distort, the natural growth of the child by selecting his experiences and then directing those experiences toward the realm of ideas. The general effect on the common schools was to shift the emphasis from memorization of abstract facts to the firsthand observation of real objects. Pestalozzi’s diminishing influence roughly coincided with the rapid expansion of the cities.

By the 1880s the United States was absorbing several million immigrants a year, a human flood that created new problems for the common school. The question confronting educators was how to impart the largest amount of information to the greatest number of children in the shortest possible time. This new, more practical goal of educators and the means through which they attained it were reflected in the new schools they built and in the new teaching practices they adopted. Out of necessity, the one-room common school was replaced by larger schools.

To make it easier and faster for one teacher to instruct many students, there had to be as few differences between the children as possible. Since the most conspicuous difference was age, children were grouped on this basis, and each group had a separate room. To discourage physical activity that might disrupt discipline and interrupt the teaching process, to encourage close attention to and absorption of the teacher’s words, and to increase eye contact, the seats were arranged in formal rows. For good measure, they frequently were bolted to the floor.

It is not surprising, at about this time, when the goal of education was to expedite the transfer of information to a large number of students, that the normal schools began to fall under the influence of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841). For him, education was neither the training of faculties that exist ready-made in the mind nor a natural unfolding from within. Education was instruction literally a building into the mind from the outside. The building blocks were the materials of instruction the subject matter.

The builder was the teacher. The job of the teacher was to form the child’s mind by building into it the knowledge of man’s cultural heritage through the teaching of such subjects as literature, history, science, and mathematics. Since the individual mind was presumably formed by building into it the products of the collective mind, methods of instruction were concerned wholly with how this was to be done. Herbart’s interest lay in determining how knowledge could be presented so that it would be understood and therefore retained.

He insisted that education must be based on psychological knowledge of the child so that he could be instructed effectively. The essence of his influence probably lay not so much in his carefully evolved five-step lesson plan but in the basic idea of a lesson plan. Such a plan suggested the possibility of evolving a systematic method of instruction that was the same for all pupils. Perhaps Herbart’s emphasis on the importance of motivating pupils to learn whether through presentation of the material or, failing that, through rewards and punishments also influenced the new teaching methods of the 1880s and 1890s.

The new methods, combined with the physical organization of the school, represented the direct opposite of Pestalozzi’s belief that the child’s innate powers should be allowed to develop naturally. Rather, the child must be lopped off or stretched to fit the procrustean curriculum. Subjects were graded according to difficulty, assigned to certain years, and taught by a rigid daily timetable. The amount of information that the child had absorbed through drill and memorization was determined by how much could be extracted from him by examinations. Reward or punishment came in the form of grades.

At the end of the 19th century the methods of presenting information had thus been streamlined. The curriculum had been enlarged and brought closer to the concerns of everyday life. Book learning had been supplemented somewhat by direct observation. And psychological whipping in the form of grades had perhaps diminished any physical whipping. In one respect, however, the schools of the late 19th century were no different from those, say, of the Middle Ages: they were still based on who adults thought children were or should be, not who they really were.

Before the 20th century, the ideas of such men as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and, in the United States, Francis W. Parker (1837-1902) had caused little more than rumblings beneath the floor of the traditional schoolhouse. Because of John Dewey (1859-1952), they gathered force, and in the 1920s and 1930s new and old ideas collided right in the middle of the classroom. Some of the schools, where neat rows of subdued children had sat immobilized in their bolted-down seats listening to a teacher armed with textbook, lesson plan, grade book, and disciplinary ruler, became buzzing places where virtually everything moved, including the chairs.

The children were occupied in groups or worked by themselves, depending on what they were doing. Above all, they were always doing: reading a favorite book, writing, painting, or learning botany by tending, observing, and discussing the plants they were growing. The teacher moved around the room, asking and answering questions, giving a child the spelling of a word he wanted to write or the pronunciation of a word he wanted to read, and in general acting as a helpful guide for the children’s chosen activities. The chattering and noise and activity were signs that the children were excited about and absorbed by what they were doing.

They were, in fact, learning by doing. Dewey maintained that the child is not born with a ready-made faculty called thinking, which needs the exercise of repeated drill to make it as strong as the adult faculty. Nor, he said, is the mind a blank tablet on which knowledge is impressed. Mind thinking or intelligence is, according to Dewey, a developing, growing thing. And the early stages of growth and of knowledge are different from the later stages. The development of the mind begins with the child’s perception of things and facts as they are related to himself, to his personal, immediate world.

A dog is his dog or his neighbor’s dog; it is something furry and warm, something to hug, feed, and play with. The child may recognize the fact that though his neighbor’s dog looks different from his, they are both dogs. When he sees a wolf at the zoo, he may decide that his dog is a nicer and friendlier animal than the wolf. The child’s zoological knowledge is thus organized around his own experiences with particular animals and his perceptions of similarities and differences between those experiences; it is psychologically organized knowledge.

The last step in the growth of intelligence is the ability to organize facts logically, that is, in terms of their relationship to one another. The formulated, logically organized knowledge of the zoologist is that both the wolf and the domesticated dogs belong to the family Canidae, order Carnivora; that the dogs belong to the genus Canis and species familiaris; and that one dog belongs to the sporting breed spaniel, the other to the working breed collie. Presented to the child in this form, however, the study of zoology has no relation to the animals he plays with, feeds, and observes.

His own experience outside of school does not bring the information to life, and the information does not enrich and extend his own experience. It represents another world entirely a world of empty words. All he can do, therefore, is memorize what he reads and is told. He is not developing the power to think. To stimulate the growth of intelligence rather than stifle it, as Dewey saw it, education must begin not at the end but at the beginning of the growth process; that is, with activity that engages the whole child mentally, socially, physically, and emotionally.

In the school, as in his extra-curricular activities, it is the process of doing something that has meaning for the child handling, making, growing, observing. The purpose of the school, however, is not to re-create an environment of relatively random activity but to create an environment where activities are carefully chosen to promote the development of intelligence. Carefully selected and guided, they become nets for gathering and retaining knowledge.

Instead of presenting children with an already packaged study of elementary science, Dewey might well have recommended that they study life in an aquarium. The child’s natural curiosity should lead to such questions as, Why does the fish move his mouth like that? Is he always drinking? His search for the answer will lead his intelligence in the same direction as that taken by the scientist the direction of formulated conclusions based on observation of the phenomenon.

He will be learning the method as well as the subject matter of science; learning to think as a scientist does. Moreover, the inquiry process need not be confined to one narrow area of knowledge but can be guided naturally by the teacher into investigations of fishing and then, conceivably (depending on the maturity of the young learner), of the role of the sea in the life of man. The barriers between subjects thus break down as the child’s curiosity impels him to draw upon information from all areas of human knowledge.

Books, films, recordings, and other such tools serve this end. Learning the skills reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic can be made meaningful to the child more easily if he is not forced through purposeless mechanical exercises, which, he is told, are important as a preparation for activities in later life. He should be led to discover that in order to do something he recognizes to be important right now, he needs certain skills. If he wants to write a letter, he must know how to spell; if he wants to make a belt, he must know how to measure the leather correctly.

Of course, Dewey was not suggesting that in order to learn an individual must restate the whole history of the human race through personal inquiry. While the need for a background of direct experiences is great in elementary school, as children get older they should become increasingly able to carry out intellectual investigations without having to depend upon direct experiences. The principle of experiencing does apply, however, to the elementary phase of all subjects even when the learner is a high-school or college student or an adult.

The purpose is to encourage in the learner a habitual attitude of establishing connections between the everyday life of human beings and the materials of formal instruction in a way that has meaning and application. The measuring and comparative grading of a student’s assumed abilities, processes that reflect the educator’s desire to assess the results of schooling, are incompatible with Dewey’s thinking. The quantity of what is acquired does not in itself have anything to do with the development of mind. The quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, he wrote, is the measure of educative growth.

Because it is a process, learning is cumulative, and cannot be forced or rushed. For Dewey, the educative growth of the individual assures the healthy growth of a society. A society grows only by changes brought about by free individuals with independent intelligence and resourcefulness. The beginning of a better society, then, lies in the creation of better schools. At about the same time that a few pioneering schools of the 1920s were trying to put Dewey’s theories into practice, the testing movement, which started in about 1910, was working up steam.

The child had first become the object of methodical scientific research in 1897, when experiments conducted by Joseph M. Rice suggested that drill in spelling did not produce effective results. By 1913 Edward L. Thorndike had concluded that learning was the establishment of connections between a stimulus and a response and that the theory of mental faculties was nonsense. Alfred Binet, in 1905, published the first scale for measuring intelligence. During the 1920s, children began to be given IQ (intelligence quotient) and achievement tests on a wide scale and sometimes were carefully grouped by ability and intelligence.

Many of the spelling and reading books they used, foreshadowing the 1931 Dick and Jane readers, were based on controlled vocabularies. After the shock Americans felt when the Soviets launched the first space satellite (Sputnik) in 1957, criticism of the schools swelled into loud demands for renewed emphasis on content mastery. The insistence on cognitive performance and excellence accomplished four things. It increased competitive academic pressures on students at all levels.

It stimulated serious and sustained interest in preschool education, which manifested itself in various ways from the revival of the Montessori method in the 1960s to the preschool television series Sesame Street in 1969. In addition, it created a new interest in testing, this time in such forms as national assessments of student performance, experiments with programmed materials, and attempts to gauge when children could begin to read. And it stimulated interest in the application of technology and instructional systems to education as a means of improving student instruction.

It was practical to open up new avenues of education… e United States was in competition with the Soviet Union. The Space Race was well on its way and America needed to change the way they learned. And practicality was the key. From the 18th century onward, as knowledge of the world increased, new subjects had been added and old ones split up into branches. Later, new combinations of courses resulted from the attempt to put the scattered pieces of knowledge back together again. The purpose was to make knowledge more rational and meaningful so that it could be understood instead of mechanically memorized. It also encouraged young learners to begin to think and inquire as scholars do.

In other words, many of the new programs developed for use in the schools, particularly in the 1960s, stressed the inquiry approach as a means of mastering a body of knowledge and of creating a desire for more knowledge. Resistance to the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision terminating segregation placed the schools in the middle of a bitter and sometimes violent dispute over which children were going to attend what schools. By 1965, when a measure of genuine integration had become a reality in many school districts, the schools again found themselves in the eye of a stormy controversy.

This time the question was not which children were going to what schools but what kind of education society should provide for the students. The goal of high academic performance, which had been revived by criticisms and reforms of the 1950s and early 1960s, began to be challenged by demands for more humane, relevant, and pressure-free schooling. Many university and some high-school students from all ethnic groups and classes had been growing more and more frustrated — some of them desperately so — over what they felt was a cruel and senseless war in Vietnam and a cruel, discriminatory, competitive, loveless society at home.

They demanded curriculum reform, improved teaching methods, and greater stress and action on such problems as overpopulation, pollution, international strife, deadly weaponry, and discrimination. Pressure for reform came not only from students but also from many educators. While students and educators alike spoke of the need for greater relevance in what was taught, opinions as to what was relevant varied greatly.

The blacks wanted new textbooks in which their people were recognized and fairly represented, and some of them wanted courses in black studies. They, and many white educators, also objected to culturally biased intelligence and aptitude tests and to academic college entrance standards and examinations. Such tests, they said, did not take into account the diverse backgrounds of students who belonged to ethnic minorities and whose culture was therefore different from that of the white middle-class student.

Whites and blacks alike also wanted a curriculum that touched more closely on contemporary social problems and teaching methods that recognized their existence as individual human beings rather than as faceless robots competing for grades. Alarmed by the helplessness and hopelessness of the urban ghetto schools, educators began to insist on curricula and teaching methods flexible enough to provide for differences in students’ social and ethnic backgrounds. In this way, egalitarianism entered into the education system.

Rather than keeping whites and blacks segregated in the schools, egalitarianists provided a way for the two groups to co-exist equally. In this case, the standards were raised instead of lowered in order to promote this new equality. Previously, whites and blacks studied on very different levels. Unfortunately, blacks were not given the same opportunities as whites were… and they did not receive the attention needed to improve the environment in which they studied.

Things changed, however, when egalitarianists raised the standards to promote equality. Clearly, the American education system has changed drastically over the years. From one-room schoolhouses to acres of college campus… from Pestalozzi to Dewey… from simple religious studies to graduate programs, education has been influenced by many different factors, such as egalitarianism, wisdom of the heart, and most importantly, practicality. Necessity is the mother of invention, they say… Just as practicality is the mother of educational reform.

The American education system has been taking some serious hits recently. In an article entitled What Our Education System Needs Is More Fs, Carl Singleton suggests that students are merely attending class, but do not complete an acceptable level of learning. Teaching levels are of low quality and impersonal in nature with an emphasis on passing the students from their classroom to the next without ensuring their level of learning meets the minimum requirements. By a widespread issuing of Fs, we as a society must look at the cause and effect aspect this will produce. Giving Fs will not solve the problems Singleton suggests, but create new ones. Society must be prepared to deal with the results of more Fs by understanding how it affects the family, student, and schools themselves.

As part of his argument for sending home more Fs, Singleton feels that this would force parents to take time out and help children improve their grades. Many parents do not play an integral role in encouraging good study habits by allowing their children to watch television as opposed to doing homework. By sending home Fs, this would force the parent to address the issue, take away privileges, and become more active in the education process. According to Singleton, the responsibility of failing children belongs at home with the parents.

It is a noble idea to have parents spend more time with their children and a core value that many politicians promote, but the reality of this situation does not always leave enough room for parent involvement. Singleton must realize that the majority of school-aged children are products of single-parent families, multi-family households, or dual working parents. The report card in the mail with a barrage of Fs will only create a hostile environment between the parent and child. The over-worked, over-stressed parent will yell at the child and could potentially discourage the childs willingness to work harder on achieving better grades. As mentioned earlier, this is the cause and effect issue at hand regarding parents and Fs.

Assigning Fs does not leave total responsibility on the parents. This would also force principals, school boards, and voters to come to terms with cost as a factor in improving our educational system. Singleton suggests that with the reality of failing students will come the obvious need to spend more money in bringing these students up to a passable level. One way or another, says Singleton, they will learn the material.

School systems across America are in need of additional funding to run a program that is adequate for todays students. Keep this in mind next time you answer your door to a neighbor kid or your friend in the next cubicle over asks you to buy some candy to help support the school programs. When you start to send home Fs, the school board becomes aware of problems in the school system, but so do upset parents who contact their district council members. Before you know it, the school is on the 10:00 oclock news for having children that do not meet the minimum standards of education. The reputation of the school is at stake. Yet again, cause and effect of Fs as related the school systems.

Lets also consider the adolescent child who struggles with daily personal battles of trying to fit in. Social pressures are beyond what adults can really understand. True, we have already traveled that road, but to an adolescent, this is new territory where self-esteem, self-awareness, and self-efficacy dominate their total existence. Giving an F to the child and holding them back from their peers who advance to the next grade level will only destroy their personal value system. Take it even further and consider the anger and embarrassment the child will feel from his family. I am sure that a small percentage of parents will see the F as a warning flag and will be prompted into action, but not a large enough percentage to deem the widespread giving of Fs as a solution.

I do not mean to say that we should continue to pass students who do not meet the standards to save face, but that careful consideration should be enforced with a student who doesnt meet the standards. This calls for more awareness at the elementary levels. Perhaps we should reduce the number of students per teacher, address the overpopulation issues many school systems face, or provide more direct attention to students who show signs of struggling through the assignments. By encouraging parents early on to be proactive in their childs education will also reduce the amount of failing students that just get passed through the system. Finally, a reevaluation of the teaching styles should be addressed. We need teachers who will motivate our children, challenge their thinking, and tap into their creativity.

As previously stated, giving Fs will not solve the problems Singleton suggests, but create new ones. Society should be prepared to accommodate childrens needs of education by supporting the education systems, the family, and the students. We need to focus on the big picture of not failing our students, but help them learn. Until we reach that level of understanding, our students will not be deserving of the Fs we will.

The whole issue of teacher certification is one of great importance and when discussed must be done in a delicate and thoughtful manner. The reason for this increasing importance is because the education of our nation’s teachers is important to the creation of an ideal education system, which is one of the goals of our national government and State governments. Over the years the whole educational reform movement has become an increasingly “hot” topic. Reforms in the administration of school systems and in curriculum theory and practice have been asked for and a4re currently being put into effect.

Recently, reform of the education of teachers is being added to the lo9ng list of reforms needed. Many reform activists feel that direct changes need to be made on the methods of training and certifying the teachers of our country. Before looking at the reform movement, however, one must first look at the so called problem of inconsistency in teacher certification. In our country today there is a general consistency among the requirements for state certification of teachers. Most states require their teacher institutions to establish a teacher education program that includes coursework and fieldwork.

The coursework includes those courses that prepare a student to become a professional teacher and those classes that include major and minor fields of specialization. Fieldwork, which is probably the most important of the two forms of requirements, involves the individual interested in being a teacher going out and observing, practicing, and preparing to enter the educational world as an instructor. There is no argument that all schools in every state has these basic requirements of teacher certification.

However, the inconsistency lies within how the numerous institutions go about in teaching hese requirements. Each post-secondary school is given the jurisdiction to choose how they are going to go about meeting these basic teacher certification requirements. For example, many states require a different amount of field hours. An inconsistency can also be seen in the various models of teacher education that are used throughout the nation. Two education researchers, Howey and Zimpher conducted a study on this variety of models in 1989. They came up with three different attempts of teacher training.

The first, known as the teacher’s college model, involves certification students entering a separate chool within a university that is a “teacher’s college”. The second approach is called the liberal arts model by the researchers, and is a method that requires and individual to become specialized in a certain liberal arts subject in order to create “capable and cultured human beings”. The third and final model discussed by Howley and Zimpher is entitled the competency-based model. This method trains individuals in the arts o motivation and understanding.

As one can see by this case study, there have been a variety of approaches to teacher certification. An inconsistency can similarly be detected by looking at the various new and innovative ideas in teacher education. Among these include the alternative route, a topic discussed earlier, and the five-year degree program, and issue to be discussed shortly in this section. Altogether, one could state that there is some inconsistency in teacher certification, and this inconsistency brings about a small problem in the educational spectrum of our world. In my opinion, there is no national and universal set of requirements for teacher certification.

The variety of different methods and forms of eacher education programs is causing an inconsistency in how teachers are being trained nationwide. When this is realized, the whole issue of reforming teacher certification becomes very relevant to our society. As stated earlier, reforms in the training of future teachers are beginning to really be requested by the general public. Various groups have met to discuss the various issues surrounding the reform movement. Among the most notable are the Holmes Group, the Association of American Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), the Education Commission of the States (ECS), and Goodlad’s group.

These various groups and many others have come up with a variety of reforms and new standards that most likely should and will be integrated into the current teacher certification requirements. One certain similarity that all of these recommendations have with each other is that they all call for higher regulations and an increase in the education of future teachers. Many of the group0s called for an increase in providing individuals knowledge on the profession of teachi8ng, and some groups also called for a more intense training in the various fields under a liberal arts education.

Increases in the amount f fieldwork required seems to also be a major issue discussed by the reform groups. The issue of selection under standardized testing was also discussed, with respect to increasing the required SAT/ACT or GRE scores. Finally, the research groups came up with various new ideas involving the creation of professional teaching schools or tiered systems that would require a teacher to go through more training even after they received their bachelor’s degree. All in all, these reform groups have come up with some very unique and interesting ideas to change teacher certification for the better.

It is the best interest f our nation to make changes in our current teacher education program, for, in this case, change would be for the better. To conclude, I would like to take a brief but in depth look at an innovative idea established by the Maine State Department of Education in conjunction with the University of Southern Maine. This program, entitled the Extended Teacher Education Program, involves future teachers continuing on for a fifth year after completing their undergraduate studies. This fifth year involves the individual taking part in internships.

These internships give the future teachers a chance at more fieldwork in order o gain more experiences before they become full fledged teachers. Nonetheless, the results of the initial year of the program seem to indicate that the idea around this new program is a successful one. Those individuals who took part in the program obtained various skills and understandings that all ideal teachers should have. The excellent outcomes of this program leads one to believe that it might be a good idea to implement this structure nationwide. The idea of creating professional schools for teachers has become a popular one in recent times.

After all if doctors and lawyers have to go to a professional school, hen shouldn’t teachers as well? In conclusion, the issue of teacher training and certification brings up many questions, especially in reference to reforming. The inconsistent and somewhat outdated education of teachers today needs change, in order to create an ideal educational system. Numerous reforms have been discussed and recommended by various research organizations and now is the time to take action and implement some of these reforms before our education systems continue to fall downwards into the depths of degradation. Change I needed and change must come now.

Based on the demands of our educational system, our society is forced to conform to the level of education that they want us to be at. This educational distortion is beneficiary to the educator’s realm and the way of governing education . We are seen as merely objects rather than subjects and are fed only facts/information that the educator only wants us to memorize not actually comprehend it or even ask questions or give our opinions to given facts/information.

This is what makes the educator the oppressor and us the oppressed. Paulo Freire’s “Pedogogy of the Oppressed” deals with the concept of oppression in the school system and suggests an alternative method of education. There is an absolute need for students to “Tear down the wall” (Pink Floyd) of conformity in education and express their individuality. Education in itself can be a contradiction. The teacher (oppressor), is there to educate/teach the student (oppressed) but is he really?

As Freire indicates “Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. ” (67). He also goes on to say “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.

Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. “(67), and he refers to this as the “banking system” where the student goes “only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. “(68). This “banking system” method of teaching, really is not teaching the student(oppressed), but rather they are given facts/information by the teacher(oppressor) that they do not fully understand, and so there really is no learning.

Also the “banking concept” holds the student down because he is told what to learn, and he is not allowed to work to his full capacity. It is because if this that the student lacks “creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. “(68). If this type of educational method keeps on, then there will be no change, therefore the minds will be filled with facts/information that the student will not always understand.

This “banking concept” method of education also keeps a restraint to knowledge for the student to a certain level because it doesn’t give the student initiative, motivation, and drive to actually go out and want to learn. In other words this isn’t the way to go about education. As Freire states “This solution is not (nor can it be found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:”(68).

To begin with, I will start with the definition of bilingual education, which is: non-English speaking students being taught subjects in their native-language by bilingual instructors usually in self contained classrooms. Back in the 1960s, there was a large influx of immigrants when the United States started permitting more Hispanics, Asians, and Africans into the country. Because of this immigrant population boom, in 1968, Congress passed, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed, Title VII of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which encouraged local schools to establish bilingual programs.

In 1974, Title VII was revised to add federal funding for teacher training, development of programs, and materials. There are several approaches for teaching bilingual education but the two most popular are transitional and two-way. Transitional bilingual education is the most common method used in schools today and teaches students non-language subjects like science and math in their native language for a limited period while the student learns English, and reading is taught in both languages.

Once students reach the desired skill level in English, they are moved into mainstream classes. Experts agree that students who are proficient readers in their native language do much better when learning a new language and that is the theory behind Transitional bilingual education. Two-way bilingual education, on the other hand, mixes non-native English-speaking students with roughly an equal number of native speakers in the same classroom where, generally, students are taught in one language in the morning and another in the afternoon.

In this situation, both native English speakers and non-English speakers become bilingual and test scores show that these students do better overall in school. In this debate we will be addressing bilingual education as it specifically applies to California schools. Since the 1970s, because of an abundance of low paying farm worker jobs available in Californias agricultural industry, immigrants from Mexico and Cuba have been steadily moving to California legally and illegally.

In 1986, The Immigration Reform and Control Act made it possible for approximately 1. illion long-term illegal immigrants in California to regularize their status, and with this new sense of security, they sought to move their families to California without negative legal repercussions. In the 1980s alone, the states population of limited English proficient students grew by 150% and grew another 40 percent from 1990 1995. California now enrolls more than 45% of the nations immigrant student population and has the huge responsibility for teaching these students English.

The main problem with bilingual education in California is the lack of federal funding needed to finance successful programs. Unfortunately, funding is being cut year after year by conservative lawmakers who do not support bilingual education and who believe that it is the states responsibility to fund these programs. Irma Guadarrama, a professor of bilingual education at the University of Texas at Houston said that in order for bilingual education to be successful, qualified teachers and sufficient materials are absolutely required.

Of course these things are impossible to obtain without funding, of which California is already spent. This is obvious when you note that in California, schools are only receiving $42 per student for bilingual education programs in comparison to $361 per student in New York and $1,581 per student in Florida. In 1992, Congress chose to withhold $812 million dollars in previously approved federal funding to help heavily impacted states such as California and each year more and more funds are cut instead of increased to meet the growing need for bilingual education.

Federal funding is absolutely necessary, especially for schools in California with an abundance of immigrant students, so that they are able to hire more bilingual teachers, build and restore schools and help support additional immigrant programs. Without this financial assistance, there will likely be a significant failure at helping these young immigrants to become a viable part of American society. Instead they will become a drain on other resources such as Welfare, Unemployment and the Criminal Justice System.