Sunday, April 24, 2011

Extended Comment on Nick's Blog

Extented Comment:

I liked Nick's blog this week. There was one thing that Nick said in particular that caught my attention, he said "We need students to question the world around them, not accept it blindly.  You have to ask yourself, did your school or perhaps a single teacher encourage you to ask questions and not take things for granted?". This statement reminded me of my writing 100 class that I took last semester.

In writing 100 we read an article by John Gatto called Against School. In this Article Gatto describes the difference between "schooling" students and "educating" them. He suggests that schools are set up to teach children how to fit into the world and live average lives, and schooling children suppresses every childs inner genius. He claims that if schools truely wanted to "educate" their students then teachers would teach their students to question the world and not accept what they are taught blindly.

Gatto believes "“schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for habits and attitudes that corporate society demands” He also believes that “genius is as common as dirt. We (public schools) suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women”(Against School). Gatto takes a hard stand agaisnt public schooling. He believes that reform should be made and students should be taught to open thier minds and question rather than accept blindly.

This article also reminded me of the youtube video we watched in class.

3 comments:

  1. I agree with the quote, “genius is as common as dirt” and that school suppress the mind. This reminds me of the multiple intelligence test we took in class and how school only address two out of eight ways students express their knowledge. You should read Mary’s and my blogs as well, we also extended off of Nick’s.

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  2. I completely agree. I had teachers in school who actually taught the class to think for ourselves and to question what we did. Then other teachers just stood up front and lectured until they thought we understood. This is exactly what Dr. Bogad shows us, especially with the worksheet concept. I think you relate it to classes and teachers perfectly.

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  3. i completely agree with the whole comment about students questioning the world around them rather than accepting it blindly. definately feel that this class helped me do that in every aspect of my life

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