Education: An Unconditional Change
...w education can change a person. For example in Charles Dickens article, “What is a Horse?” he touches on the satirical view of a school driven on mechanics. This school where children are discouraged from using their imaginations, he asks the question, what is a horse, to a girl in the classroom (65). She responses that she doesn’t know, so the teacher switches over and asks a boy in the classroom who answers the question in a specified and analytical definition comprised of hard facts (66). What this is showing is the way education is changing this boy into a way of submissive thinking. The school wants to provide education as long as the students will change there ways into this thought of bare facts. Stern also supports this idea concerning that the schools are trying to get us to learn a certain manner while preventing people from learning about a similar subject from the same issue. He would throughout his monologue discuss drugs and how the schools wants to teach about drugs, but doesn’t want the students to discuss current events, because if they are disappointed, they will take drugs (68). In this, we can see that schools are constantly trying to adjust the way people think and how they would analyze a certain subject without having to go to much into the subject to prevent having to explain other things. Stern conveys an irony through this monologue of a concerned school trying to limit a person through education (68). These are all example of attempts these authors used to portray the schools determination to steady and mechanize the students changing minds. It is hard to hold a person to a straight single line of knowledge when they can see different lines branching off in other directions. As people go through life and acquire education, we start to realize how much it plays a role in our life and how important it is to change with our ever changing standard of living. As I reflect upon those times, I realize how education was taught and my input to that. Looking back to my high school years, I can retrace the classes which used the type of education that Dickens described in his article concerning a straight-forward and linear way of learning (65). This type of learning, as I observed, proved to be ineffective and left the students of my class baffled, wanting to know more. The teachers using this method of educating can’t expect the students to follow the whole idea, because sometimes they would omit things to make it less difficult, but the absence of this detail could only deepen the confusion. This is how Stern portrayed his view on school, trying to limit the education of the students (67). Some of my teachers used this type of method and left me confused and it was hard to learn under these circumstances. With this, the education that I was not receiving had indeed changed me to pursue a better style of learning. The classes that I had excelled most at were the ones with an open style of teaching. Through the course of high school we learn many things and carry them on through our education. Whether we know this or not the education from school and the environment changes us to help us adapt. Some may say that education does not change a person’s traits and personalities. One of the primary reasons that education changes people is because students admires and identify with those who sky rocket over them in experience, intelligence, maturity and charisma. So not realizing this when a person does become intrigued with these idols, they begin the process of shaping one’s self through education. People take the education that they receive and use this knowledge to help them form broader characteristic for themselves. In Gilmore’s essay, he writes about his struggle living as an intelligent man classified as just a good, smart, black man (129). As Gilmore grows up and excels, his education causes him to break the old stereotypical view of African Americans being inarticulate thugs with no goals. Doing this he starts to confront a problem as Hooks had with alienation (79). So Gilmore must change to try and fit in, but he later on realizes that he is not going to live a lie and goes through the day his preferred way (131). As we look back we can decide whether or not to change, bu...