Getting
Getting
This interview, focuses on Dwayne Lowery who started off as a line worker in a factory and became a field representive in a major employee union. During his transition, he had to learn new ways of being literate especially since in his younger years as a high school student he didn’t read as much because of parental influence on what was available to read in the house. However, when Lowery got a grant to take time off work and travel to Washington D.C. to attend a union training activity. Once he came back he was offered a full-time job at the union and eventually noticed that the people who he was negotiating with often lacked the mannerisms and academic level. Lowery can accredit his new lease on the literacy world to the “educational networks the unions established during the first half of the twentieth century”. Now sponsors in literacy whether it’s a person, a thing, or an event all impact in two different but powerful ways. They either “help to organize and administer stratified systems if opportunity and access” or they “hinder literacy activity, often forcing the formation of new literacy requirements while decertifying older…
Blue Collar Brilliance, by Mike Rose, describes the cognitive misconceptions we have toward people who hold jobs that require little or no educational background. Mike, a professor at UCLA reflects on his life experiences. In 2009, Blue Collar Brilliance appeared in the American Scholar, a publication by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In addition to this article, Mike has authored many books that focus on literacy.…
Every year we look forward to walking into our tech centers. We look forward to using the brand new equipment. Thousand dollar Macintosh computers lined up in perfect rows. But rarely do we wonder (or appreciate) where these new things come from. All of the tools we need are funded by an act that was passed in 2006 called the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. This funds a vast majority of the secondary and postsecondary career and technical education programs, and is vital to the development of ourselves as the next generation of workers in todays society.…
In his essay “I Just Wanna Be Average,” Mike Rose details his school life in South L.A. Now a professor of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, Rose moves through secondary school at Our Lady of Mercy on the Voc. Ed. Track, revealing why the standardized versions of this “educational system” betray the core values behind liberal, humanistic education as we understand it. As Rose wants to stress the value of all individuals, the discrepancies between their actual intellectual capacities and how the system classified and treated them, he paints his fellow students in Vocational Education in great detail. His title comes from Ken Harvey, who, among the many colorful characters and lively Americans Rose met, dropped the defining one-liner of his entire Voc. Ed. Experience:…
Michael Moore recognizes that while several Americans attend school and move on to higher education, the systems current programs in place leave much to be desired. Moore works to convince the reader on American ignorance when he says that “70 percent of those who graduate from America’s colleges are not required to learn a foreign language” (132). He also relates that several top universities do not require a course in American history to fulfill graduation requirements. Additionally, only a few of the prestigious universities who have students majoring in English Literature require that they attend a Shakespeare course. Moore gives examples that have the potential to sway readers into believing the current educational system in place for both public schools and higher education is failing to meet simplistic prerequisites for learning standards that benefit…
Ghost in the Nursery; Repercussions of abuse and neglect in child development and family dynamic…
The long range remedy for restoring and improving American literacy must be to "institute a policy of imparting common information in our schools." In short, according to Hirsch - the answer to our problem lies within the list. Hirsch's book explains the importance of the need of a higher level of national literacy. His main argument is that cultural literacy is required for effective communication and the "cooperation of many people..." Communication is what Hirsch sees is essential for success in today's society.…
It seems that in this day and age the college curriculum does not only put emphasis on the giving and receiving of facts and information, but is inevitably being pushed in the direction of student entertainment. Subjects such as literature, philosophy, and history are not as popular as they once were, and are in danger of becoming extinct in the academic world. Mark Edmundson's essay, "The Uses of a Liberal Education", provides many interesting and valid points on why the liberal arts field is becoming devalued in the education system.…
“The New Liberal Arts” is an article written by Sanford J. Ungar, who is a president of Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. In the beginning of his article, Ungar wrote, “Hard economic times inevitably bring scrutiny of all accepted ideals and institutions, and this time around the liberal arts education has been especially hard hit.” In other words, Ungar means that recent economic recessions have made a huge impact on what people think of going for a liberal arts degree. In his essay, Ungar lists seven misperceptions and how he reacts to them. The most common misperception that Ungar identified is that liberal arts degrees are no longer affordable. The cost for liberal arts education is very expensive while most families are struggling with the economic is going down. Thus, the second misperception is, with a liberal arts degree, it is hard for graduates to find a good job. Moreover, liberal arts degree seems to be irrelevant and unimportant especially for low income families and first-generation college students. Other misperceptions pointed out by Ungar are: the STEM (science, technology, engineer, math) are what people need to learn right now instead of arts, American education system is too old-fashioned to stick with liberal arts education, and while the cost for liberal arts education is very high, the outcome of appears to show no gain in productivity for the ways graduates do their work. Finally, Ungar states that one of the misperception is because the United States is being led by a liberal Democrat, who seems to bring more problems to the country than solving the existing problems, so it is better for the young adolescence not to follow that same road. Among Ungar’s entire list of misperceptions, I found several of them are strongly disagreeable because he is a president of a liberal arts college, so it’s undeniable that he holds biases, and personally, I think whether to go for a liberal arts degree is mainly an individual…
In the article Said another way, Halter and Polet (2002) discuss the history of a liberal…
Due to the course Introduction to Liberal Arts, I was able to gain a multitude of scholarly attributes that overall contributed to my ability to understand the assigned passage in a critical manner and to construct my paper. The integrated studies course that I have been apart of for the last semester is very much essential to what I believe a liberal arts education should be and that is clearly also the case of the Monmouth College Faculty as well. The class is essential to mine and my fellow students’ developing intellect. Within my individual Introduction to Liberal Arts class, we focused on three main readings: Curious, Eating Animals, and Persepolis. We also addressed the three required articles: Master of Many Trades, Interest as the Missing Motivator in Self-Regulation, and “Only Connect…”. These together allowed myself and my class to be engulfed in the initial liberal arts experience.…
Gioia warns that as increasing numbers of Americans put down their books, they also invest less in the nation’s civic and cultural life. In a program moderated by writer Jewelle Gomez, Gioia calls for a revival in reading, beginning in the schools.…
In recent years education reforms have been a major concern in American society. The article, Study: Students Need More Paths to Career Success discusses offering career-driven alternatives to a four year college degree (Armario, 2011). In examining this article I will answer the following questions:…
With 18.2 million people attending college in 2007, Steve Job’s success without a formal education is remarkable in a society where higher-level education is essential. Innumerable amounts of people are pursuing a higher level of education since it has become a requirement for those who want a substantial and efficacious career. This higher education also expands one’s astuteness and overall ability to function in today’s society.…
It is to Victoria College that I can attribute the fact that Bell Canada, Oxford University Press and McClelland and Stewart all failed to hire me in the summer of ‘63, on the grounds that I was a) overqualified and b) couldn’t type, thus producing in me that state of joblessness, angst and cosmic depression which everyone knows is indispensable for novelists and poets, although nobody has ever claimed the same for geologists, dentists or chartered accountants. It is also due to Victoria College, incarnated in the person of Northrop Frye, that I didn’t run away to England to become a waitress, live in a garret, write masterpieces and get tuberculosis. He thought I might have more spare time for creation if I ran away to Boston, lived in a stupor, wrote footnotes and got anxiety attacks, that is, if I went to Graduate School, and he was right. So, for all the benefits conferred upon me by my Alma Mater, where they taught me that the truth would make me free but failed to warn me of the kind of trouble I’d get into by trying to tell it—I remain duly grateful.…