The Education Of Children By Michel De Montaigne

Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he is fed for a lifetime. In today’s society, education is very similar to this statement. Schools are commanded to teach aspects of life that only benefit the student for an end-of-the-year test. Students are not taught what is to come in the life after school. Because of the poor quality in education today, the emphasis on standardized test has become overwhelming.

Lastly, people should value formal education over informal education because formal education reflects a standardized system in which society works. In the chapter “Credo,” from the novel, Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez exemplifies how formal education teaches the standard system of society through his Catholic school’s philosophy of teaching. He recalls how in his youth, the Catholic religion connected his public and private life despite the growing division of education and family because he could not differentiate between his home and church Catholicism. Rodriguez attended a Catholic school that emphasized the practice of memorization to learn about God and the Bible. Reflecting on their method of teaching, he realizes that “For contrary to more progressive notions of learning, much that is learned in a classroom must be the already known; and much that is already known must be learned before a student can achieve truly independent thought” (Richard 94). In opposing the modern concept of learning, Rodriguez discovers a universal truth about formal education in which “much that is learned in a classroom must be the already known” because a student must understand and process the knowledge already discovered before they can “achieve truly independent thought.” Rodriguez uses an anadiplosis to explain that the concepts and information in school, the “already known,” must be learned by students in school in order for the capability of discovering different things on their own

In the essay, “Education”, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a transcendentalist thinker, asserts that Education is damaged and he knows of a solution – the educators. He develops this claim by first introducing the paradox linking “Genius and Drill”, expressing his ideal method of teaching. Throughout the essay, Emerson tends to have a condemning tone against the educator but towards the end he changes it into a comforting one. Emerson’s purpose is to present an alternative style of teaching in order to persuade educators to use the teaching method by using paradoxes, rhetorical questions, and shifts in tone. He establishes an informative and didactic tone for educators who value attention to detail.

Education means something different for everyone. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (33). The truth to this is that education affects us in every aspect of our lives. Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. In Rose’s exploration of the purpose of school, he also reflects on his personal experiences and how those experiences gave him tools that are applicable to his daily life. Mike Rose’s Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, emphasizing how those experiences become crucial to one’s personal growth and potential.

Getting an education is the main goal for everyone, although it is easy to obtain there are some obstacles to it. One of the main obstacles students face at the beginning of their education is standardized tests. Schools have started to adopt this type of tests as their main way to evaluate students’ intelligence and teachers’ effectiveness to educate the students. The way students used to learn has changed, in order to get them ready for the tests they have to spend much of the school time preparing for it instead of learning something they can use in their future life. According to Bruce Jacobs in No Child Left Behind's Emphasis on 'Teaching to the Test' Undermines Quality Teaching, a 2007 study by the University of Maryland teachers were put in much pressure and had thoughts to teach the test […]. This shows that teachers have also been affected by standardized tests in a way they have more pressure to make students pass. Having teachers ‘teach the test’ means their way to educate has been corrupted. In most cases when teachers’ ability to educate has been changed leads them to practice methods not convenient for scholars. One of these methods is memorization, in Relying on High-Stakes Standardized Tests to Evaluate Schools and Teachers: A Bad Idea by Hani Morgan describes how students start to adapt to an “inferior type of learning, based on memorization and recall students gain when teachers

Many are quick to disregard education’s role outside of the classroom. According to Mike Rose, “a good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” (Rose 33). Rose emphasizes the value in the experience of education beyond the value of education for the purpose of custom or intelligence; he explores the purpose of going to school in terms of how he defines himself and his personal growth in the stages of his academic career. By reflecting on his personal experiences and how those gave him the tools applicable to his daily life, he emphasizes why education should never be overlooked. Rose’s use of referencing relatable experiences in a logical manner makes his argument persuasive to the readers and he succeeds in making the readers reconsider why education matters to them. Mike Rose’s Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us effectively persuades his audience of the importance of education beyond the classroom, which proves true in our everyday lives because the essential aspect of education is what we do with it and how it helps develop one’s personal growth.

“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things” (Jean Piaget).

In addition, schools are like assemblies that are require to follow procedures. Assemblies follow ideas or rules to have organize the people, for this reason schools due the same thing. However, those who don’t follow the procedures would show a low progress in class. For example, in the article “Kid, I’m sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material” by Michael J. Petrilli shows how students perform low in their academics’ level, and instead they decide to work because its less challengeable. As a result, not every college student is capable of attending and graduation from college because of their education level. However, everything leads back to when the college students were children. Their academic preface in college show a negative path

(STEWE-1) In order to gain knowledge, education is clearly a necessity and schools are what give us that education. In Montag’s society, school has just about no learning involved. The government has made it so that “‘School is shortened, discipline [is] relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages [have been] dropped, English and spelling [are being] gradually gradually neglected, [and] finally

The author compares today’s school system to that of the past, which concerned itself with teaching students,

Throughout the history of civilization, there have been many great thinkers and philosophers who lay claim and offer their theory of the world around them. Michel de Montaigne, a prominent philosopher of the French Renaissance, argued in his essays of the habitual inconsistency of man and how it is nearly impossible for man to correct these everyday irregularities and contradictions. To say that man is flawed and utterly irregular are statements not particularly surprising or revelatory for philosophers to make, even in Montaigne’s time. However, what can be considered unique about Montaigne, aside from his sharp perceptions of the everyday man, are his sharp—and honest—perceptions of himself, never bragging about his intellectual prowess or

There were certain aspects of learning that he emphasized more than the others. Not only did he focus on major works that the people should know but also on “…writing in verse and prose…” (3) Castiglione had the ideal image in his mind of exactly what people needed to be and the way they should act. When he said this, it was greatly respected because of his writing of his well-known conduct book. However, people began to veer away from this ideal of a needed education; it became a major change for society. Later on, in the Letter to the Parlement of Dijon concerning the reopening of a French Jesuit school, it was explicitly said that all men do not need an education. Some men need to do work that is not based off of education; they need to do the basics that make society properly function. “The study of literature is appropriate only to a small minority of men.” This statement explicitly says that an education is not for everyone, boldly going against Castiglione. (11) This was a bold statement to make, because it showed a drastic change in people’s point of view of a proper man. Along with saying not all people needed to be educated, there was also the vast criticism of the school system and the way it was teaching. The concepts being learned in school needed to be more readily applied into real life situations, and this did not seem to be the true goal. (8)

The education of children has existed since the beginning of time as parents have taught and molded their children into the young adults they desired them to be. Initial training of children was not in a formal setting, although history would see numerous settings, purposes, and methodological changes. Philosophies of education have also changed through the years as various voices have seemed to grasp the purpose of educating the next generation, thus laying out objectives to reach those goals of teaching children.

Richard Rodriguez?s essay, Hunger of Memory, narrates the course of his educational career. Rodriguez tells of the unenthusiastic and disheartening factors that he had to endure along with his education such as isolation and lack of innovation. It becomes apparent that Rodriguez believes that only a select few go through the awful experiences that he underwent. But actually the contrary is true. The majority of students do go through the ?long, unglamorous, and demeaning process? of education, but for different reasons (Rodriguez, 68). Instead of pursuing education for the sake of learning, they pursue education for the sake of job placement.

Instead of absorbing knowledge, students are left gazing through their teachers’ eyes as information goes in one ear and out the other. The best students are the ones who memorize for tests, yet they do not understand what it is they are learning or how it can relate to the world. In school systems, the job of the educator “is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students” (Freire 4). The teacher manipulates the way a student learns by allowing only certain information to be released. Only supportive statement for the “banking” concept is that an “educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world” (Freire 4).