Education and its Importance in Society

What? In the reading “Sabrina Needs Her Identity Back,” Lorena believes that her job as a human being is to use the education and knowledge that she has gained from school in order to make a positive impact in people’s lives. While Lorena is at her North Carolina internship, she sees the terrible places which the farmers live in. She realizes that they are living in terrible conditions and even acknowledges that prisoners have better living conditions than them. Because of this, she comes to understand the importance of using her education to help these people when she states, “When I saw all this, I told my supervisor that my mission is to change one person’s life. Educate one person, so if their boss tries to be bad to them, they’ll say, ‘No, I know you can’t do that, that’s against the law.’ If I can do that, then I’ve done my job as a human being. I at least wanted to give them knowledge to defend themselves with” (“Underground America” 194). This demonstrates how Lorena sees education as more than just a tool for learning. She wants to be able to use her education help people such as these farm workers to fight for what is right. Her ability to spread her knowledge to the farm workers will allow them to gain the courage to stand up for themselves and fight the difficulties they are facing. Lorena further acts on her goal to use her education to help others when she puts together an organization on her school campus to educate people about the issues the farm workers are facing and helps to pass the Emergency Heat Bill: “We also helped with passing the the Emergency Heat bill into law in California to reduce the number of deaths from heat stress in farm-workers. . . . We helped organize a press conference with one of our state senators, and were were the only organization there. . . . All these reporters had to walk through the dirt and sit on buckets and listen to a state senator talk about why it was important to get this law passed” (“Underground America” 200). When Lorena helps to pass the Emergency Heat Bill, this allows the farm workers to understand that they have right to fight for better working conditions because being forced to work under such terrible heat without any chance for breaks is unfair. In the reading “Islands of Decency,” Myles believes that his job as a human being is to provide chances that will allow people to grow and continue to grow. He wants people to be able to take on the chances that have been given to them and learn from those chances themselves rather than being forced to learn from that chance. Myles knows that these people all have the potential to grow, and he wants to give them an opportunity to grow as much as they can: “My job is to provide opportunities for people to grow (not to make them grow, because no one can do that), to provide a climate which nurtures islands of decency, where people can learn in such a way that they continue to grow” ( Horton 133). Myles wants to give people opportunities in a way which he can aid them to achieve their full potential and solve their own problems rather than solving their problems for them: “Stretching people’s minds is part of educating, but always in terms of a democratic goal. That means you have to trust people’s ability to develop their capacity for working collectively to solve their own problems” (Horton 132). Myles’s willingness to give people opportunities to learn, help them develop into their full potential, and enable them to solve their own problems help them a lot in life by allowing them to establish the strength and confidence to face many difficult issues that they are dealing with or might come across.

So What? Sabrina comes across the social issue of the exposure of farm workers to pesticides. During Sabrina’s North Carolina Internship, she meets many families who are unaware of the danger of pesticides: “ It was really eye-opening, because a lot of these families, they didn’t even know what pesticides were. And they didn’t even know they were bad. . . . You just think that’s common sense. But they don’t know. They don’t have access to the internet” (“Underground America” 192). This issue is important to her identity and sense of meaning because Sabrina values the life of every human being, and she is can identify with them on some degree since they are also working in terrible conditions to make a living. Sabrina fought so hard for her education, and it is a part of her identity. She sees the meaning of education as a tool to be used to help others who are less fortunate than she is. However, when she realizes that these people are not educated about the harmful effects of pesticides, it has a huge impact on her identity and sense of meaning. This issue increases her desire to use her education to help the farm workers who do not have an education and are unaware of the harmful effects that pesticides have on them. This is significant because it is a huge problem that people do not know the harmful effects of pesticides when they are exposed to it every single day. Pesticides are very dangerous, and they can lead to many serious illnesses and diseases in the farm workers. If the farm workers are exposed to this every single day, that will lead to many of them getting serious illnesses and can eventually lead to death if the illnesses are untreated. This idea helps me to think differently because I wasn’t aware that farm workers didn’t even know that pesticides were bad for them. I now know the importance of education, and I understand how important it is to do something to help these farm workers who go through so much hard labor in order to survive. A social issue that Horton is involved with is the issue of bringing change in the South. Horton is living in a time of the Labor Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, and he is fighting for rights for people of color. However, he wants to fight for these rights using nonviolence: “I believed very firmly that the only way you could deal with the problem of civil rights was through nonviolence” (Horton 142). These issues are important to his identity and sense of meaning because he values the lives of all people. He believes that the meaning of people’s lives is to be able to make decisions and understand how those decisions will impact their lives: “What people need are experiences in democracy, in making democratic decisions that affect their lives and communities” (Horton 133). He knows that fighting violently is not the answer, as that will create more problems as a result of his decision. Helping people to understand the impact that their decisions will make, along with helping them to solve their own problems and reach their full potential has been one of his biggest goals, and those goals make up a big part of his identity and meaning. Because of this, Horton understands that making the decision to fight and bring change in the South will positively impact the community people that are suffering. Therefore, his desire to bring change in the South is important to his identity and sense of meaning. This is significant because people of color need to be able to have basic rights such as the right to vote and express their opinion. These ideas expand my perspective because they help me to realize that the ability to make decisions and vote can either impact the community in a positive or negative way, which means that it is important bring about positive change by making good decisions.

Now What? Lorena and Horton both value their education and use it to make a change in the social issues that they are engaged with. After coming back from her North Carolina internship, Lorena states that her education is crucial to her life due to the its ability to help others who are suffering. This is demonstrated when she states, “I couldn’t understand, after seeing all that — what was going on in the fields- for ten weeks, that no one would want to come back and continue to fight. I said to myself, I have to do it. We have to keep educating people about the issues” (“Underground America”199). This shows how passionate Lorena is about using her education to fight for what is right. She knows that she can do something to make a change in the lives of the farm workers by helping to spread this issue around to those who are unaware of it. Horton also sees education as something that is crucial to his life and the lives of others. In his eyes, he sees that education allows a person to make decisions. Decisions may seem like something small, but very important decisions have the ability to affect the lives of others and make big changes in a community. Horton emphasizes the importance of education and making decisions when he states, “Popular education should give people experience in making decisions. Many take it for granted that people can make decisions, but actually, the majority of us are not allowed to make decisions about most of the things that are important” (Horton 134). Therefore, he sees education as an instrument used in making decisions, which can impact not only his own life, but also the lives of many other people. I see education as a very important part in taking a stance and striving to make the world better for all people. Often times, there are many issues that go on in the world, but people don’t take action because they are unaware of those issues. At the same time, I feel that informing people about the issues alone is not enough. There are many issues such as pollution or global warming that people know about but don’t care enough to make a change. Allowing people to see or experience the detrimental effects that issue has on a person or society could be a possible option in encouraging people to take action. Yes, there is a connection between my own education and social issues. Last semester when I took Nutrition class, we were exposed to issues such as poverty, homelessness, and hunger. We learned about the different solutions that could be done in order to help end these problems that were going on in the world. Being educated about certain issues is one thing and actually doing something about the issue is another thing. After learning about the terrible conditions that the farm workers are facing, I know that my next step is to help them out by donating money, participating in protests, or writing to my senators about the importance of working conditions for farmers.

Ex. Credit: In the podcast story “You Had One Job,” the ethical dilemma experienced by the robot is wondering whether or not it should end the life of Owen, who is the unsecured ordinance. Some truths about being human include the robot’s ability to have feelings and value human lives. When Brian tells the robot to end the life of Owen, the robot starts to have moments of hesitation. This robot tells Brian that it has been programmed to not take a life, and it needs to be convinced by Brian that ending the life of Owen by using the detonator is okay. In addition, the robot’s feelings for human lives are also revealed when it tells the girl to get off the street to avoid danger. There are connections between the robot’s dilemma and larger social/ethical issues in our society. One ethical issue I can think of is the job of a soldier or any job allowing people to have end the lives of individuals. Toward the end of the podcast, Brian wipes away the robot’s memory of ending the life of Owen, and he has the robot turn its eye away from what became of Owen after he died. An example of a job in which people are forced to take lives include soldiers having to take the lives of one another and having people perform the executions of prisoners that undergo death penalties. Overtime, these people may become desensitized to taking the lives of others, which is similar to the robot turning its eye away and forgetting the fact that it just ended the life of a human being. This is an ethical issue because the fine line between the morals of taking human lives may start to be unclear and eventually vanish over time.