What Is Education For?

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Miss Lonelyhearts
Posts: 176
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2013 12:53 am

What Is Education For?

Post by Miss Lonelyhearts »

Preparation for democratic citizenship demands humanities education, not just STEM

The author is quite famous in the academic humanities world, and her most recent book about the Declaration of Independence got quite a bit of mainstream press. The essay is about the value of humanities education for creating useful/engaged citizens, which I'm generally supportive of, but I thought her conception of citizenship might be of interest to EREs:
Such civic agency involves three core tasks. First is disinterested deliberation around a public problem. Here the model derives from Athenian citizens gathered in the assembly, the town halls of colonial New Hampshire, and public representatives behaving reasonably in the halls of a legislature. Second is prophetic work intended to shift a society’s values; in the public opinion and communications literature, this is now called “frame shifting.” Think of the rhetorical power of nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Martin Luther King, Jr., or of Occupy Wall Street activists with their rallying cry of “we are the 99 percent.” Finally, there is transparently interested “fair fighting,” where a given public actor adopts a cause and pursues it passionately. One might think of early women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage.
Each part sort of blends into the next, but I would say ERE is currently stuck somewhere in the second. The use of the phrase "prophetic work" reminded me of this MBTI article:
Without Introverted Intuitive personality types, it is said that Israel would have had no prophets.
I recommend the full article to anyone interested in the above, although I haven't read each response (Allen also has a response to responses).

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GandK
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Joined: Mon Sep 19, 2011 1:00 pm

Re: What Is Education For?

Post by GandK »

This paper made me uncomfortable. On a few occasions I had to stop reading it for a minute because of cognitive dissonance. I realized that's because I'm a stakeholder on many levels WRT public education, and in each role I inhabit, I have different goals.

As a student I want all classes and all knowledge available, but as a parent I want to herd my sons toward classes that might make them money. Where does that leave me in the classics debate?

And as a citizen I want all voters to be well-informed so our democracy functions better, although I'm suspicious of the type of civics education that takes place in public schools, especially politically. But as a taxpayer I'm not willing to spend an arm and a leg to bring all stragglers up to speed, and this entire conversation strikes me as a problem of limited resources, both temporal and financial. Again, I feel pulled in two directions.

Also, I think most people who actually care about government vote. The ones who don't... is it wise to attempt to make them care? In our society we talk a lot about people who are left behind. We rarely acknowledge that some folks just wander off, like tourists leaving their guide to go explore other, more interesting things. Are the people who don't participate (read: vote) really disenfranchised? Or are they simply elsewhere?

Lots of good questions here. Thanks.

Dragline
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Joined: Wed Aug 24, 2011 1:50 am

Re: What Is Education For?

Post by Dragline »

I think people generally give educational systems too much credit and/or blame for societal outcomes, when there are so many other factors at play and there is really no "national system" in the US at all. This also seemingly presents a false dilemma of STEM v. humanities, as if STEM is somehow preventing students from reading Shakespeare.

This article reminds me of that saying "to a woman with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." It's also argues largely from defining things, like citizenship, such that the conclusions are largely inevitable deductions.

Two thoughts: (1) people who really have specific desires about education generally do not send their children to public schools and/or are highly selective about which ones; (2) as G&K alluded to, all of this information is available for free, yet very few people avail themselves of it in any serious manner. The latter reveals that the author may be talking about creating a perfect world for a society of humans that actually does not exist, much like economists.

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