Web Page 8: Education

Education and schooling have and continue to serve as an integral part of my life (going on 13 years now with, I hope, many more). Every day since I turned 3-years-old, I’ve spent some 6 hours a day, 5 days a week in school. That adds up to a lot of time in school. And I often, lately, ask myself: what has all this time consumed in schooling done for me? And I always, even lately, answer my question thus: education affords me the reliance to think for myself as an individual.  Education allows me to use the knowledge I learn in school to help me unravel the unanswered questions of my world—to discover and explore it. Schooling pushes me to engage, question, answer and argue things logically and rationally; sometimes I’m pushed far enough to engage, question, argue and think outside of the box (and when I nudge beyond the cliché, I think outside of the circle). Education and schooling provides an experience for me that allows me to sift through many different subjects and topics, helping to form and determine my many likes and dislikes. But clearly, education and schooling helps me in a very real and practical way: to set goals for myself. Without goals, I’ve found, I can get easily lost, distracted, off-track, less motivated and generally directionless. Education and schooling shows me why a boat needs a rudder.

            Defining education as “the gradual process of acquiring knowledge,” I know and understand that my education and schooling won’t end when I graduate  high school and college (not to mention post-doctoral and the fellowships—did I mention goals?) Education is not a thing to be terminated like a contract or even a relationship. We must grow and learn (and re-align our goals as we do) everyday of our lives. The day we don’t is most certainly our last one.

Web Page 7: James Baldwin

In James Baldwin’s 1963 essay A Talk to Teachers, he focuses mainly on the negative impact of society on students.  One important quote Baldwin uses in his essay is, “The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” Education allows an individual to question the society one is learning in.  The tension however comes in when much of society seeks to suppress this questioning, as someone consistently questions and disobeys is seen as dangerous to the societal order of things. But Baldwin states that society’s only hope for change is through those individuals who question.  If no one questions anything around them, everything remains the same, no change occurs.  Change is necessary to move forward in the world and in society, hopefully in a positive direction. What if Rosa Parks didn’t refuse to move from the front of the bus to the back of the bus (and go against society), racism against blacks in this country could have been more prominent and prolonged. Even though it was only person, one person can make a difference in this world. Education’s main goal should be to create the ability in a person to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, “to decide for oneself whether there is a God in heaven or not,” and make conclusions from what ONE sees, experiences, and thinks. To “ask questions of the universe,” and then learn to live with those questions, is the way one achieves their own identity. If you don’t develop your own decisions and opinions on things you lose who you are.

Baldwin also makes some sort of mention of children and how when they are born they are born with a “neutral” mind if you will.  They can’t tell the difference between a black person and a white person, all they can sense is the fact that these people are different from one another. Little children are innocent until people like parents, teachers, and guardians drill the racism into their head. There really isn’t a solution to getting rid of racism and prejudices, its part of human nature it will always be there. Perhaps a solution would be for racist people not necessarily to absolutely love someone of another color, but understand and accept them for who they are as people. We all are living in this world together, might as well get along.

           

Web Page 6: Francis Bacon

In Francis Bacon’s work, Novum Organum or “New Organon,” Bacon describes a new method of logic he believes to be superior to Aristotelian syllogism. In, Novum Organum Bacon suggests that finding the essence of a thing was a simple process of reduction, through the use of inductive reasoning attempts understanding through drawing generalized conclusions from a finite collection of specific observations.

Bacon’s 1620 seminal work may be characterized by the popular phrase: “You can’t see the forests for the trees.” For Bacon, one must first understand trees before one can understand a forest; that one must first examine each and every tree, understand each type of tree before discussion of a forest, an aggregate of trees. By way of analogy, if one is studying the French Revolution, one can memorize every single date, river, battle, general, strategy but, ultimately, should one be asked write an essay in answer to “What was French Revolution about?”one would have to consider, in a manner of Bacon, many more variables and instances such as weather, climate, religion, economics that would induce something to be said, generally, about revolutions first, then induce upward, more generally, about a French version of revolution. That is, before Bacon got to Revolution or even French Revolution, the forest, he would have us look at each tree, at each contributing factor or circumstance of “unease” or “unrest” or “disturbance” of a people, then a larger group, then a nation. Bacon would seek to understand revolution first by noting its individual characteristics, size them up and, finally, add them up. Specific to general.

Aristotle, conversely, might look at revolution first, and subtract, attempt to differentiate its constituent parts, to deduce from “revolution” what makes revolution. Aristotle, looking at the forest of “revolution” might suggest that the trees of “unease,” “unrest” and “disturbance” in weather, climate, religion and economics can be sifted, shaken, subtracted, isolated, or deduced. Given a forest, look to the contributed trees to best understand the phenomena. For Bacon, one must look at trees, and add them up, to eventually call such a collection a “forest.”

The approach to understanding found between Aristotle and Bacon may cause some tension. One subtracts (deduces), the other adds (induces). But the real tension stems from Bacon’s break from the old ways of thinking, of the old ways of approaching thinking and science. Not just breaking from Aristotle but from Bacon’s break from the more recent “rebirth” or Renaissance. Bacon thus breaks twice: from Aristotle and the re-kindled interest in Aristotle.

And thus Bacon’s place in the English Renaissance itself. Bacon calls it, after all, the “New” Organon.