Bumble: Giroux // ACTIVE OR PASSIVE?

Education…
What is the purpose? My entire life I was told that going to school was about thinking critically, making informed decisions, and have evidence to be able to back up your point. Until going into the CMC major, honestly, I have not felt that those who preached actually followed through in teaching. My parents were the ones who taught me to think critically and meticulously. Even so, I sometimes do not feel the need to question my parents when they tell me something. This is because of the ideology of "older is wider..." NOT ALWAYS true, although many times it is!

Most of the students who you would talk to are so threatened by bad grades in as Althusser would say is an oppressive state apparatus, that they are not concerned with truly learning and challenging what we learn, but rather, just listening and following directions. They say to challenge what we hear, but many teachers will punish if this happens. I believe it is important to challenge always, not in an oppressive or negative way, but rather a quizzical way. When someone tells me something, I like to ask why they think that and where they heard that from. Much information that we hear is spoken without points to back it up, and so that is why it is important to ask the questions.

Also, people fear asking questions because of how they might appear in class.

One class which I took, really opened my eyes to the notion of our right to question and ponder information flung at us from all directions. My frontiers to physics class, was taught by president Duncan, and the most important thing he taught us was never to accept anything at face value. What we are taught growing up is that science is a hard truth that is testing and therefore must be correct. He made us challenge this conventional knowledge and look at how these scientific conclusions were made. You have to be even more critical about science given to you, because many of us are not experts in it, and tend to take the science as a given truth. Nothing can ever be proven true, you can only prove something else to be false. Theories are what make up our lives, not facts.

Rollins College does not excel in students challenging authority, think about how few protesters there are. But, for the most part I believe it has to do with the ideology of GRADES. While this article suggests to not have a clear cut curriculum, I thrive on structure and some sort of path, predetermined.

This article also remindined me of the class when we discusses opposing ideologies like active and passive. Both are seen as positive and both can be seen as negative. Particularly in the genre of education.