Jan 01, · Dancing or Dance, We all love to do and learn new skills to get better which we can show off on events in family gathering, party and blogger.com here we will give you number of essays on topic of dancing. We will help students to get the best essays on “Essay on Dancing” topic and we have written 9 essays with great care and balanced flow for students of school and college level Oct 13, · A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir'd at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of The 'little learning' version is widely attributed to Alexander Pope ( - ). It is found in his An Essay on Criticism, and I can find no earlier example of the expression in print: A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely
Pierian Spring - Wikipedia
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, a little learning is a dangerous thing essay, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it.
They said they wanted to a little learning is a dangerous thing essay doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were. Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there.
When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children.
Who, then, is to blame? We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible.
Certainly not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom.
Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap. The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license.
After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember.
By the time I finally retired inI had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness.
Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling.
We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools?
What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"?
Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up? D o we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?
Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right.
A little learning is a dangerous thing essay Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret A little learning is a dangerous thing essay. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all.
Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, a little learning is a dangerous thing essay, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person?
Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated. We have been taught that is, schooled in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either a little learning is a dangerous thing essay intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons.
Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools? Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between anda little learning is a dangerous thing essay, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century.
The reason given for this enormous a little learning is a dangerous thing essay of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold: 1 To make good people.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. Mencken, a little learning is a dangerous thing essay, who wrote in The American Mercury for April that the aim of public education is not.
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim. is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States. and that is its aim everywhere else. Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm.
His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here.
Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern. The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's book, The True and Only Heavenwas publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the s.
Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German- speaking people had settled here by that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws.
But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable.
I t was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century - that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling.
Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2, a little learning is a dangerous thing essay, to 4, students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado.
Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the Stateand was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between and A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's book, Principles of Secondary Educationin which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that a little learning is a dangerous thing essay schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table.
Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole. Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:.
Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely.
It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races.
Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, a little learning is a dangerous thing essay, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country.
A Little Knowledge (Is a Dangerous Thing)
, time: 4:45An Essay on Criticism - Wikipedia
We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of at Arkansas College In Greek mythology, the Pierian Spring of Macedonia was sacred to the blogger.com the metaphorical source of knowledge of art and science, it was popularized by a couplet in Alexander Pope's poem "An Essay on Criticism": "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.". The Pierian spring is sometimes confused with the Castalian Spring Jan 01, · Dancing or Dance, We all love to do and learn new skills to get better which we can show off on events in family gathering, party and blogger.com here we will give you number of essays on topic of dancing. We will help students to get the best essays on “Essay on Dancing” topic and we have written 9 essays with great care and balanced flow for students of school and college level
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