Global Studies 2A:Comparative Political and Religious Systems
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
 
Concerning Mr. Bennett's piece: I think you need to look at the bigger picture here, you make several good points concerning the concept of, "learn from your mistakes," but you obviously need to take some more time to actually think about what you are saying. Many people who attend public schools learn through this, "learn from your mistakes," and it seems for about a good 75% of the population this, "method," is not working. You seem to believe that school is only an aspect of one's life to acquire life long lessons and maybe pick up an education as a sidedish, but you do realize that schools are designed to help you what you were talking about but as a more important focus, teaching a general education which touches on various subjects to create diversity. You say that the best way to obtain a quality education is to live an imperfect life, this does not impose morals and values which are shared by a community. If every lived by these rules, there would be a dramatic increase in chaos, backstabbing, meddling, and murder. It is almost like puting humans in an evolved natural state into groups, and just have them fight things out without any structure or logical bases. What you have created is a society without a purpose or system of any sort, its just a bunch of dudes chill'n and only being concerned with what affects themselves to better their situation in life. You're society is greedy, do you approve of this o' wise sam?
Monday, September 08, 2003
 
Andy Howe
Plato Reflection Paper: “What is the perfect education? Does VCS provide it?”
9/7/03
What is the perfect education? According to Plato, through Socrates, the perfect education is based around totalitarianism. Through the dialect in Plato’s third book, the message delivered deals with the methodology of propaganda and all that goes with it. Plato elaborates time after time through careful examples dealing with the specifics of propaganda their purposes versus their reality to existence.
Socrates speaks of techniques concerning the meddling of what the population, youngsters, elders and everyone in between, can and cannot hear or experience through the arts of music, story telling, poetics, etc. Socrates can be quoted,
“Just leave that mode which would appropriately imitate the sounds and accents of a man who is courageous in warlike deeds and every violent work… leave another mode for a man who performs a peaceful deed, one that is not violent but voluntary…” (399, a) This quote shows evidence of his intensions in using music as propaganda in order to accentuate certain qualities in the individual. Through these examples, a number of tests are run in order to ensure the validity of their conclusions. These tests are aimed to guarantee the themes of courage, flawless core to one’s soul, justice, peaceful deeds, and moderation. Likewise, the stories and examples commonly condemn all types of drunkenness, softness, and idleness. Socrates uses all these conclusions to shape the perfect society and guardians who will keep it in tact. Morals and the essentials are decided and agreed upon, and they are represented through virtually everything in the society, from philosophy, interactions with others, to the specifics concerning which melodies and rhymes will be acceptable for the population to endure.
In opposition to Socrates’ model of a Utopian society, the reality of the current world we live in has minimal resemblance to that of the one modeled by Socrates. Although many of the same morals and beliefs of this Utopian society are advocated in modern reality, but they hardly enforced to the degree of Socrates’ model. Rather, minimal propaganda is put in place merely for the encouragement of order, morals, and themes of courage and such are put in place to guide peoples into what a collective belief agrees upon as the right path for the general individual to begin exploring. Unlike the totalitarian setup of the modeled society, reality in the local community, concerning the Vermont Commons School, general laws decided by the democracy of the peoples, make outlines as to the information a student needs to obtain to be successful. Unlike the laws of the Utopian society, reality allows individual schools to accommodate their own teaching styles or methods to anything or anyhow they wish; as long as the student is able to pass a national standard test which certifies them for college, where new doors will be opened for them.
The perfect education, obviously the methodology expressed by both Socrates and Glaucon cannot be of any use to the realities of the modern society. This is so because, in order to accomplish the mutual feats of both the model and reality, if one were to utilize specifically the modeled techniques of intense propaganda because it would be imperative that the peoples of the society be subjected to a skewed reality as youngsters. The city must first be stripped of all age, and replaced with youth in order to obtain any effect. If this stage were to be skipped, chronicles and stories and knowledge of history would be passed down through generations and the city’s purification process would seize to exist. So plainly, these methods could and will not be put in place because the conditions are not and cannot be present.
Under the conditions that are present in today’s society, there is almost an unlimited amount of freedoms in the ways of teaching education. In the public schools there comes a rubric of education, every student encounters the same challenges in the same way; and the techniques to teach them are all the same, designed for the average student. As an average per capita, students are able to excel under these conditions, but for most students they slip by with minimal effort, care, and enthusiasm. For the average student, the potential for excellence is lost in a dark room absent of a key, but this potential can be discovered through methods used in some private schools. To generalize, if everyone were to attend private schools; wouldn’t those simply turn into present day public schools? Not necessarily, they could use private school techniques or there could be an increase in schools, resulting in an increase in faculty. To grasp the idea of, “private school techniques,” one refers to specialists in human understanding, people learn differently and the teacher needs to accommodate for that.
Ideally, the teacher and student can obtain maximum performance through strong student-teacher relationships, fluctuation in teaching styles, and a low student to teacher ratio creating a more frequent one-on-one friendly atmosphere. Besides this, the school or class as a whole should further their bond with each other through non-educational activities and settings of the, “norm,” according to the student and teacher. In some cases students feel left out or discriminated in a way because their learning styles and backgrounds do not comply with those of the public schools. Through this discrimination it can be noted that tension and frustration builds between the student-teacher relationships, so it becomes a more of an, “us, and them,” based community; “us,” being the children, and, “them,” being the faculty. In Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” Album, such things are expressed. Through the song, “Another Brick In The Wall,” such lines can be quoted,
“…We don’t need no education,
We don’t need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher leave the kids alone…
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall…” (Pink Floyd, “Another Brick In The Wall)
This is a superb example of children feeling controlled through attempting the methods of Plato in the public schools, hence, “We don’t need no thought control,” meaning that they can think for themselves provided guidance, brain washing.
These students are not receiving the individualized education they need to perform to their full potential in life. The student and teacher should feel a degree of comradeship to one another in order for them to trust each other and take risks in the classroom.
Through these bonds and friendships, both students and teachers alike will carry these values home with them and they will reflect through their everyday practices, thus improving the state of the society. Peoples all around should be taught to value the same morals in order to obtain a common within a group of people.
So ultimately this is the ideal education which one could offer a population, for a perfect education does not exist. There is no perfect education for if there was one, it would have to be specifically designed to fit a specific individual but this is not possible. Nearing this goal, it can be resolved by increasing the number of schools and their teaching styles. By doing this, the individual can pick a school which best fits him or her so that they can explore their individuality with more freedom because their path has somewhat narrowed in their favor.
The Vermont Commons School (commonly known as ‘VCS’) has done a wonderful job in creating an environment for education, and the love of it to flourish. This prosperous atmosphere best fits the enthusiastic individual who enjoys learning and being active in it and in the community. The Vermont Commons School achieves these goals through creating a community involve the pre-discussed strong student-teacher relationships. This can be obtained through everyday school life, after school activities, or through encounter weeks. Once the comforts of camaraderie are set, the individual is allowed to then proceed in finding and identifying themselves through experiences and interactions with the atmosphere around them.
In conclusion, there is not a perfect education, for it is seen through the modeled society and through the reality of the world that there are different values and morals within a population for a reality put aside an idealization. One can customize the ideal education for a specific society and make a conscious effort to turn that into a reality, but even at that, one has to further narrow the focus to a group of individuals with a common learning style. So multiple schools can be formed to contain all of these different learning styles.




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