Conventional Learning, the Death of Education

I really liked Collins’s take on democracy and how African Americans have been routinely stripped of the rights of first class citizens. I think she does a really good job in expanding why a critical education is vital to democracy. As Ayers points out, conventional education locks us into situations that reduce us to learning mindless and irrelevant routines to conform to society and even comparing teachers to workers in a business. Collins states that in her own education she was not made to be a passive consumer of democracy, but rather demanded that she be an active citizen via engagement and participation. This is what we need to strive for. She states that, “New forms of racism retards our ability to further democratic processes and that a critical analysis of its organizations… will equip us to develop new ideas” (179). It almost feels like with education we become well behaved clones of one another just to not inconvenience society and when we don’t want to conform we are the odd one out, the dumb one.

I think that both Ayers and Collins’s take on conventional education and its imposed limitations on students correspond with my own take on education. They both call for the embrace of a critical analysis of society. I, myself, feel like my own growth is obstructed by conventional learning. As early as 3rd grade, I stayed in my seat during a math exam because my teacher had told students previously that if we left during an exam we would be marked down under no circumstances. I peed my pants in class. When my mother came to give me a change of clothes, the teacher told me I was foolish and that if I really had to be I should have just left the class and she would have understood. Just this small instance really stuck with me. In another instance in 8th grade I was involved in a huge cheating scandal where many students copied the answers for a project where we had to observe the moon everyday for a month. A lot of the students were caught and we were all given a 0 for the assignment. I beat myself up for a lot of other little instances and for not being able to appreciate getting an education, while it also made me feel really undeserving of an education. Really only until college did I see that my own view of the world actually mattered and meant something. I truly believe that if I had to endure one more year of conventional learning I would have given up hope on my own ventures in education. I can’t imagine what that is like for people to experience that feeling of hopelessness more early on in their education. In my classmates’ structural analysis presentations I learned a lot more about racial bias and inequity within education. A lot of our community partners deal with oppressed communities. Mine specifically, Canal Alliance, obtains a lot of students of Latin American and immigrant descent.

I think that Zora Neale Hurston’s application of the right of oppressed people to tell their stories is really important as differing perspectives allow us to critically analyze ideas within society. I feel like a lot of stories of oppression that I learned of during my education were made to sound very mundane and of no importance to my life only to tell me that I should “appreciate what I have”. Stories, that’s mostly what it was about. They were tales that we were tested on, maybe asked what year it occurred. Really only until learning of my own family’s struggles did I feel like I needed to know more. Not only does this type of education disservice students, but it also doesn’t allow the in depth analysis and recognition of the lives that had to endure day to day oppression. It is something that must change. In my opinion, I feel like it starts by asking and knowing about where you come from, to understand and recognize the depth of your own privileges and obstacles.