Education Is Essential For A Positive Classroom Experience

     The Arts of the Contact Zone by Mary Louise Pratt opened up a whole new concept for our class. The new term “contact zone” appeared and Pratt defined it as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today." The idea of the contact zone is intended in part to contrast with ideas of community that trigger much of the thinking about language, communication, and culture.

Richard Rodriguez had faced a lot of problems that most students in America do not have to deal with. Richard had to deal with parents that couldn’t help him in school and wanting to be successful academically. He had become embarrassed of his background and where he came from and did not want to embrace his culture.

Eventually Richard Rodriguez develops bitterness towards his parents. For being uneducated and ignorant, His thirst for knowledge has transformed him into someone who holds a distain for those without knowledge or esteem. Then he transforms into someone who feels guilt over his success. His family life has turned into an atypical situation where there is very little closeness between him and the other members of his family. This is caused by his increasing want to distance himself from what he believes to be uneducated.

Richard Rodriguez was born in Sacramento, California and his parents are immigrants from Mexico. He went to a private catholic school and was a scholarship boy which means that the other parents that had their kid there had to pay a little extra for Richard to stay. Richard read a lot in his classes and he never understood why reading was so important when it came to his education, but

Education is a topic that can be explored in many ways. Education is looked at in depth by both Richard Rodriguez in his essay, “The Achievement of Desire”, and by Paulo Freire in his essay, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education.” After reading both essays, one can make some assumptions about different methods of education and exactly by which method Rodriguez was taught. The types of relationships Rodriguez had with his teachers, family and in life were affected by specific styles of education.

The “Arts of the Contact Zone”, an article written by Stanford professor Mary Louise Pratt, discusses many different ideas about culture and communication by utilizing what she calls the literate arts. Pratt explains many terms that she believes are beneficial in gaining a further understanding of a literary piece. Key terms such as, contact zone, autoethnography and transculturation are introduced in her essay. She describes contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power”(Pratt 487). The contact zone can be summarized as a space where two groups with different beliefs or ideas intermingle. In the essay, Pratt also describes the literate arts that come out of the contact zone. Literary arts are ways of addressing problems in the contact zone and sometimes make an attempt to resolve the issue that is happening or has happened. Two terms heavily discussed in the essay are autoethnography and transculturation. These are only two of the many literate arts that precipitate out of the contact zone. Pratt defines autoethnography as a “text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them”(Pratt 487). The culture often takes on those stereotypes in some form of literary work and presents it to the dominant culture often trying to change their views or perspectives. Autoethnography is often used as an effective method

Hilda Neatby’s work, So Much to Do, So Little Time, discusses how progressive education is problematic in an elementary and secondary school setting. She focuses on the condition of education with excerpts such as, Education for Democracy, The Product of the Training School, and My Small Wars with the Educators. In order for the critical conversation paper to be sufficient, a need for sufficient relatable sources should be acquired. In the essay regarding the critical conversation, I attempt to not only support Neatby's research, but also plan to go against it with the sources found.

Brazilian ideologist Paulo Freire has both challenged and subsequently shaped the modern concept of education as well as the nature of the student-teacher relationship with his radical ideas. In his essay “The 'Banking' Concept of Education”, Freire fervently deconstructs the flaw within the education system and offers a solution which he believes mediates the teacher-student imbalance. The detrimental facet of academic institutions, Freire argues, is the “oppressive depositing” of information by teachers into students. He goes on to explain that such a system merely institutionalizes a one way “transaction” in which the teacher is the only true benefiter. Freire presents the reader with his solution to such a systematic problem with his

The ideologies put forth by Paulo Freire including liberation education, pedagogy of the oppressed, inequality and pedagogy of possibility gives educators hope. These are the educators who are dedicated to bring about positive change in education and by extension society. Freire’s contribution to education through his research and theories resonates with Trinbagonian educators as it encompasses issues of slavery, colonialism, post colonialism social mobility and democracy. Furthermore, Freire’s ontology is grounded in comprehensive philosophical underpinnings including that of John Dewey and Jean Piaget. Their contributions have shaped education internationally as well as locally.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes about what the education system supposedly need to be. He critiques that the education during his era is almost as similar as dictatorship. In this style of education, teacher has the superiority over their students. The teacher is the one who know everything, while the students are considered to know nothing, and that is absolutely unfair towards the students because they do not have the chance to "learning". Furthermore, based on Kirp 's excerpt entitled 'Make School a Democracy ', he reveals the solution towards the education system problem during Freire 's era. The solution is also known as Escuela Nueva (New School) model. Hence, what do I realize is the education is a process of teaching and learning between the teacher and the students. An effective education system leads the students in becoming a person with a good thinking skills who able to understand the facts rather than memorizing it.

In the point of view of Paulo Freire, he argued that humanization is the true 'vocation ' as well as the central problem of man, as history has reflected that both humanization and dehumanization can be real alternatives. Humanization is our true 'vocation ' and this 'vocation ' is being attacked as well as negated. In order to restore the humanization, liberation is the fundamental drive of humanity and it is a key for social change. Liberation is the leading point to awake the critical awareness and the thinking process of the individual in the society. The oppressed is needed to restore the humanity of both the oppressors and the oppressed, which is the struggle of the liberation when it is carrying out. Freire suggested a new idea of education, that generates a partnership between the teachers and the students, permitting the student to engage into a dialogue and be able to start the process of humanization through thinking.

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher whose distinctive visions have influenced the perception of people towards traditional education. In his essay “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, Paulo criticizes the current educational approaches and teaching methods, comparing the depositing of information into the students to the act of depositing money into a bank account, and offers another positive way of teaching as an alternative to such approaches. Although Freire could convince his audience of his opinions using his own way, his hypocritical descriptions of the points he talked about have failed him to reach a certain level of credibility in his essay.

The world would be a better place if every child had the opportunity to an education. Education is an extremely vital part of life. Without an education, people would live a life of ignorance and close-mindedness. It helps society function and behaves civilized. Education is a philosophy which is the study of examining and thinking about questionable ethical problems and accepted certainties. People study philosophy to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world they live in and the relationships to the world and to each other. Paulo Freire was a man who was willing to fight the education system by creating Critical Pedagogy and by the changing the world with his idea. It was a social movement and philosophy of education that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related theories to the field of education and the study of culture. Paulo Freire was an idealist whose purpose was to build critical consciousness in literacy campaigns, especially in Grenada.

Paulo Freire was an educational reformist from Brazil. Some had called his approach to education as radical. He had practical and theoretical ideas of education and believed in liberation through education. Much of his work had been based on involvement in teaching in the third world, which meant many that he taught had limited literacy skills. In 1959, he was exiled from Brazil because his method of education had threatened those in power. Friere wanted people to develop a theory of existence. This way, people are constantly reflecting and acting on transformation of their own perception and the world so that it becomes a more equitable place.

We tend to forget that whatever tools students need are not necessarily the ones that we received. For if we were trained for yesterday, students, on the other hand, will live and work twenty and thirty years from now, in a world whose contours we can hardly fathom. Schooling is trapped in the instruction mode, or in other words, indoctrination, far from the aspired horizon of education, as a communal, complex and liberating phenomenon. Reform movements cannot redeem the school from its shortcomings: they are merely more of the same, albeit in a different form; some sort of patchwork jobs.