Assignment No. 3 in Foundations of Education 2 (2nd Sem, AY 2011-2012)

Below are some quotations on education. Select three of these (must be a combination from both modern and postmodern quotations) and explain each one in your own words.

Modern Quotations on Education:

1. “You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms.” (Quoted in Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics)

2. “Do we want to use our colleges to produce hundreds of busy little conceptualizers, explainers and verifiers, talkers and analysis-makers at a time when the conceptualizing and analytic mind has been running wild through the world, having detached itself from the simple human virtues of love, compassion, tenderness, and empathy which it is the task of any education in sensibility to foster?” (Harold Taylor, Students without Teachers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969, p. 156)

3. “Education is not about self-esteem. Education is demeaning. It should be about teaching you what you don’t know, what you yet need to know, how much there is yet to do. Part of the process of education is teaching you that you are related to people who are not you, not your parents—that you are related to black runaway slaves and that you are related to suffragettes in the 19th century and that you are related to Puritans. That you are related to some continuous flow of ideas, some linkage, of which you are the beneficiary, the most recent link. The argument for bilingual education, or for teaching black children their own lingo, assumes that education is about self-esteem. My argument is that education is about teaching children to use the language of other people.” (From “The New, New World,” an interview with author Richard Rodriguez, Reason, August/ September 1994)

Postmodern Quotations on Education:

1. Michel Foucault: “It is meaningless to speak in the name of—or against—Reason, Truth, or Knowledge”

2. Andrea Dworkin: “Women have been chattels to men as wives, as prostitutes, as sexual and reproductive servants. Being owned and being fucked are or have been virtually synonymous experiences in the lives of women. He owns you; he fucks you. The fucking conveys the quality of ownership: he owns you inside out.” (Intercourse)

3. Michel Foucault: “Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force. … What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn’t hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely ‘justified,’ because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality.” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice)