Better Education Leads to a Better Life
After this reading I have a better understanding of the purpose of an education. Although the main purpose really is to educate, the underlying purpose is to teach students how to think for themselves. In the reading “A Talk to Teachers” by James Baldwin, he shares what the true purpose of education is, “The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not” (Baldwin, 1). It is important to educate students about decisions they are faced with making for themselves. Yet instead of this way of teaching, society really is conforming us to, “a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society” (Baldwin, 1). The reason that society does this is because it does not want to change. Change is very difficult. And so instead of change, things stay the same. Freire states in “We Make the Road by Walking”, “If we could change a society like we can change the position of the furniture of this house, it would be fantastic… The corner of education is not so easy to change” (Freire, 216). The only way that things can change is if we go through the process and pick out the flaws in our society. If there is a flaw we must work together to help change it. Although this is not an easy task and it may take years, it can eventually be done.
In our society today, education is power. It can determine the types of jobs you can get and thus how much income you receive. Without a proper education, you will not be able to make an adequate living for yourself or your family. This is why in our society there are oppressed people. In “Paulo Freire”, a quote caught my attention that said, “The emphasis on education as necessary for liberation that black people made in slavery and then on into reconstruction informed our lives. And so Freire’s emphasis on education as the practice of freedom made such immediate sense to me” (Hooks, 51). For oppressed groups of people, education is necessary to better their lives. Without education, they will not be able to receive high paying jobs or afford to have necessities in their lives. This is also tied into my community partner. To better their lives they are receiving a high school education and then they would like to go on to receive a college education. This will overall better their lives along with their families.
One point that I had never really thought about was made by Bell Hooks in “Paulo Freire.” It states, “Men and women are human beings because they are historically constituted as beings of praxis, and in the process they have become capable of transforming the world — of giving it meaning” (Hooks, 48). We as humans shape the world through everything we do. But this did not happen overnight, it took hundreds of years of practice. It is hard to try something for the first time and actually succeed at it. Through this practice we are able to learn from history and from our past mistakes. Through this learning process we have transformed the world. This point is important to critical consciousness because in order to gain a deeper understanding of the world, humans have to explore it, even if that means through failure at first. Through this failure people can find answers to what they are searching for and gain a deeper understanding of the topic. This is what education is all about. Learning new concepts and applying them to daily life or just knowing them in general.
A second point that is a necessity for cultivating critical consciousness is the teachers. Teachers are vital to education because they are adults who see students every day. They are the ones, along with a student’s parents, who can make the most impact in their lives. Freire states, “For me the school is a social and historical institution, and in being a social and historical institution, the school can be changed. But the school can be changed not exclusively by a decree, but by a new generation of teachers, of educators who must be prepared, trained, formed” (Freire & Horton, 220). The purpose of a teacher is to educate students on specific subjects or what is necessary so the students are able to be valuable members of society. If the teachers do not care for the students or what they learn, essentially just doing the bare minimum of their job, then the students truly aren’t learning. It takes a knowledgeable teacher to get students excited about a topic. Teachers should inspire students to be the change and to educate them what is happening in our country.
What speaks out most to me about these readings in relation to my community partner is what was said near the end of “A Talk to Teachers” by James Baldwin. He discusses near the end how if anything is going to change then we as a society have to help be a part of that change. This is what the volunteers and the meaning behind Canal Alliance are about. They are there to help educate and give these students the resources to go to college. It was amazing to me when I first walked into Canal Alliance how the entire room was decorated with banners for colleges all over the country. It amazed me how inspired these kids were about where they wanted to go to get a degree. Through Canal Alliance, this is actually possible now because there are people there that are able to teach the students and help them make their dreams a reality. In the long run, this is going to boost the family’s financial status so that they can make a better living for themselves. Most of these families live on just 30,000 dollars a year. The goal of Canal Alliance is to send their students to college to get degrees so they can start to earn more money and have a better life for their family. To do this, they have to go against society and be a part of that change.
