Impact of Education
Both Zinn and Horton work on expressing their idea that with education and power people can gain knowledge and a sense of freedom. Similarly, they both believe that when you give power you allow a person to perceive freedom, to be specific, freedom of speech. In contrast, Zinn believes with power handed to specific people it keeps the uneven balance between people, which is okay. However, Horton believes that with power it allows social equality. Zinn makes a point that in order to understand and learn about history you have to know the full history and not in just one perspective that is written in the books. “So, yes, history can be trivial and history can be really important, depending on what you do with it and depending on what you learn.” (71) This quote is pretty self explanatory and Zinn makes his point here that the only way you can learn is to see all perspectives of history. He says the stories written in history books are all a bias & popular version of the history. “Who was the president during the Mexican War?…But are they important questions? The Times could have asked really important questions about the Mexican War instead of asking who was the president during the Mexican War. In the United States we grow up in a quiz culture, where we’re rated on the basis of how many of these kinds of questions we can answer.” (68) I chose this quote because I believe in really corresponds with Zinn’s advocacy. We go to school and we learn the material but we are always tested on what we can memorize. We never test or analyze the material, therefore, we are not really learning anything.
On the other hand, Horton believes that you should learn from your own level. “…you always choose to work with them where they are. That’s the only way you’re ever going to be able to work with people and help them, because otherwise you separate yourself from them.” (132) Horton makes a strong point that a person cannot learn at the same pace as someone else. By teaching at different levels based on the student, you give a sense of equality within the students because all students end up learning all the material and they will all be able to understand. “When you’re a holist, that means you are a part of the whole; you not only hurt with someone who’s hungry, you hurt with the prisoner who’s suffering, you hurt with the whale that’s suffering, you hurt with the people in South Africa, you hurt with everybody in pain.” (131) Power is also important. Horton believes that if you give the student the power to control the way they learn instead of imposing a certain way to learn the material it also allows equality. “Given genuine decision-making powers, people will not only learn rapidly to make socially useful decisions, but they will also assume responsibility for carrying out decisions based on their collective judgement.” (134)
Zinn argues for the importance of knowing history and the larger context of events and issues because you cannot know history if you only know the bias side of the material. This ties in with Horton’s views of neutrality because if you succumb to learning just what is taught in the textbooks you are not benefiting in anyway. Similar to being a neutral party, if you are neutral you give your voice or decision to the majority. You allow yourself to be deprived of real information on history.
All these points connect to my community partner in several ways. I work with students who are learning about math. Math is a very difficult subject and not all students will be able to solve problems the same way. There are different approaches and techniques to solving each problem, this refers back to Horton’s idea that students need to be taught at their own different level.
