The Poet Of Our Dreams Essay

There seems to be no perfect answer to the question, “What is the purpose of education?” Every expert and activist probably has a different answer. Martin Luther King said the purpose of education is to, “…enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life (King, 1947).” Eleanor Roosevelt argued that the purpose of education is good citizenship (Roosevelt, 1930). Others, like Newman (2006), posit that education is a much broader idea. It is the “entire process by which a culture transmits itself across a generation” (Newman, 2006). In trying to form my own idea of the purpose of education, I tried to look at all of these ideas

Everyone has an equal right to an education (Warnock, 1975), what each individual chooses to do with their education is up to them. Education should be liberating, having the capacity to involve students in the pure joy of learning and increasing their capacity to think. Why get educated if education does not serve any instrumental purpose (Marples, 2010). Society would suffer without individuals trained in the required skills to undertake work that maintains humanity. The most obvious function of

Frost further points out that the stretch of woods being viewed is very rural. This is made possible by the reference to the location between the woods and frozen lake. In closing the final sentence of the second stanza Frost reiterates the fact that this occurs on “the darkest evening of the year” stating the darkness of the mood.

As Laurence Powell Jobs once said, “It’s not that our high school system was not designed well, but that it was designed in 1906 when the country was just out of the industrial era. There hasn’t been a substantial systemic change the way we do high school since then.” It’s no secret that the current school system used in America is outdated and problematic. With a plethora of obvious issues in need of fixing, there are noticeable differences between America and other countries. Steps needed to improve the system can be implemented. Although times have changed, the American education system has become outdated and thus is riddled with faults. When compared to other education systems, it is clear that the American schooling system is in need of reform.

Education is considered a right in most first world countries and compulsory public education has been in effect in the United States for over a century. So, why do governments have trouble assigning a purpose to public education and experiencing student growth across the board? How can schools change their approach in order to ensure that their students are ready to create their own opportunities? Scholar and politician Winston Churchill notes in his autobiography, My Early Life, “But now I pity undergraduates, when I see what frivolous lives many of them lead in the midst of precious fleeting opportunity. After all, a man’s Life must be nailed to a cross of either Thought or Action. Without work there is no play.” (p. 113) From this it can be concluded that Churchill believes the purpose of education is to teach students how to be active in their community along with the importance of judgement and choice, in order to further the success of their country.

Malcolm X once said “education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today”. From adolescence to adulthood almost every person is put through schooling. As one gets older in age, the education they obtain becomes more rigorous in order to stretch their minds far beyond two plus two or what color the sky is. The strategies of critically thinking and being able to analyze/decipher information in front is them is reinforced routinely in the educational system. With this being said, the purpose of education is to aid in enhancing one’s qualification, socialisation, and subjectification skills within the society regardless of how or where one’s education was obtained.

The purpose of education is to provide all children with the tools to reach their fullest potential. Realistically educational systems have failed (and have been set up this way) to exclude various groups based upon race, gender, orientation and social class. This is the history that education is trying to deal with, and overcome (Roland, 2009).

Reflections Within is a non-traditional stanzaic poem made up of five stanzas containing thirty-four lines that do not form a specific metrical pattern. Rather it is supported by its thematic structure. Each of the five stanzas vary in the amount of lines that each contain. The first stanza is a sestet containing six lines. The same can be observed of the second stanza. The third stanza contains eight lines or an octave. Stanzas four and five are oddly in that their number of lines which are five and nine.

I believe the purpose of education is to give students the necessary skills to reach one’s full potential. In “The Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez, the author tells how his involvement with education caused him to become disconnected from his family. Because there were no minority studies, the author had to adapt to a Western European point of view which caused him to become isolated from his family, while also disconnecting him from his culture; however today with the emergence of multicultural perspectives, minorities are able to understand their culture and create deeper connections with their communities.

Although high school experiences are of value and contribute social skills to the lifestyles of teenagers, Leon Botstein’s critique of the American high school sufficiently addressed the concerns with the high school educational system. Botstein articulates his opinion at the beginning of paragraph three with the clear statement that “the rules of high school turn out not to be the rules of life” which teenagers are expeditiously learning. Students are not being properly prepared for the trials they will encounter in their adult lives after they graduate from high school and into this true barbarous world. This generation of graduates will be innovating society and reaching new heights. Schools should be shaping creative and problem solving individuals that can be easily integrated into society. The president of Bard College and the author of Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, Leon Botstein, outlines the issues that are affecting high school education in his 1999 writing of Let Teenagers Try Adulthood.

Another way to approach education and its purpose would be to examine the relationship among schools and their responsibility for their students. While the previous paragraph was about the contribution to society as a whole, this one is about the personal effect that schools should have on their students. What should be the focus for public schooling, and how does that have purpose? This is an important question, and it sounds awfully familiar. A common conception of public schooling is that it’s a place to formally educate and prepare children for college and careers that will determine their lifestyle and place in society. However, most people forget to consider that the most important thing in life is to just be happy. Harry Brighouse, an author and professor of philosophy, does a great job in explaining how public schools should educate children in a way that leads to a “flourishing” life (Brighouse, 2008). He believes that schools should change the way they approach education to help students achieve more than academic success. However, the idea that a schools purpose should be to develop students so that

In his essay, “Idiot Nation,” Michael Moore directly conveys the horrid truth behind American education when he utters the sheer words, “the knowledge (students) acquire in school is not going to serve them throughout their lifetimes. Many of them will have four to five careers in a lifetime. It will be their ability to navigate information that will matter” (Moore 141). According to Moore, American education today is by no means preparing students for the real world of work. In fact, he infers that students must acquire the acute skill of navigating through information that will guide them into the career they will eventually pursue. The American school system not only teaches students unnecessary material, but also does not stimulate principle qualities that students need in order to develop into bright, innovative, and independent individuals. Structured public education does not breed entrepreneurial spirit; but rather, it destroys it. For what seems like endless years, students are programmed to obey rules, to do homework, to accept discipline rather than learn. They simply learn to submerge their unique personalities under the sort of “totalitarian dictatorship,” which the American school has come to represent implicitly (Moore 147). Because they don’t promote intelligence, creativity, and individuality, current-day American schools fail to prepare their students for the modernized, competitive world of labor, where an idea parallel to Herbert Spencer’s “survival of

Although many Americans attest to the validity of a sound American education, the darkest secrets of this glorified giant have yet to be revealed to the public to expose it as the greatest enemy of the rising youth in contemporary culture. Beginning with the rise of the Common Core Initiative as well as the No Child Left Behind Act; youth has been tossed into an industrialized education where the government has top priority in reformation of learning techniques while schools, who shape the students themselves, have the lowest priority. This is all possible due to the rising number of teachers heeding the “Initiative,” using invalid strategies for instruction—homework becoming the dominant source for reinforcement of fundamental concepts. The habits formed by students in high school indubitably carry over to post-secondary education; as a result, the recent graduates are unprepared for what awaits them in the next steps of rigorous education. Public American Education was founded upon fine values; however, the end results don’t justify the means of education as more and more youth are thrusted from the “Race to the Top” into a competitive “Race to Nowhere,” ill-equipped to face the real problems of the world; thus, the public education system is inadequate to bring up the future leaders of this nation.

Getting educated is very important for every person. It goes without saying that each of us has to have a proper education. We learn how to read, count and write. These are the basic abilities we acquire and use during our life. Is there any other purpose of education or it is aimed only at giving us a possibility to communicate our ideas and satisfy basic needs? During centuries, there were different interpretations of the purpose of education. Many scientists, pedagogues and philosophers tried to answer the question: what is the purpose of education? Taking into consideration the needs and tendencies of a modern society, we can assume that the purpose of education is to prepare students to be self-sufficient citizens capable of solving

Countless times, I have been asked the following questions: “Why do I have to go to school?”; “Does school have a real purpose?”; “When, where and how will the things taught in school be useful in life?” Children have been asking these same question for years or perhaps just my child and students. I answered by saying the purpose of school is the same as the purpose of life; we’re here to grow and learn. As learners grow, life skills will develop and independences will come. Of course, that’s not the answer they wanted to hear. Today, faced with the same question what is the purpose of school, my response is to enhance the mind of a learner so they can advance to the next level in the game of life. Every gamer knows in order to be successful in the game you must acquire knowledge about the game. “Knowledge is power” is a proper quote dated back to 1597 by Sir Francis Bacon. Most of that knowledge comes from learning the basic skills in schools such as reading, writing, and math. Although, I believe education should include much more than the basic learning skills such as real life skills.