Bellyfull of Words

At a time where teacher’s salaries have barely budged in over a decade and funding for schools continues to dwindle, education can no longer remain on the back burner of national concern. Both teachers and students need to become top priorities. In order to bring education to the forefront, we must first understand its purpose and importance to our lives. For once we have a clear understanding of the foundation that education has the potential to create, we can then decide how to best build up on it. In my opinion, three major issues facing both teachers and educators today need to be addressed in order to make this happen: redefinition, revision, and reformation. Redefinition of education’s purpose and position in society, revision of current standards and practices, and reformation of the current system. These are essential building blocks in creating a more effective and appreciated educational system.
To define what I think the purpose of education is, I must first begin to explain what education is not about. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not education, but are means of education." I think he brings up an interesting point. Schools are not the only sources of education; they are simply a means of facilitating it. For many of us, education begins first at home. We learn how to nurse, to crawl, to walk and talk from our very first teachers, our primary care providers and by actively experiencing the world around us. Our senses teach us not to touch or eat certain things. Our bodies tell us what's wrong and when to stop. Until we begin to enter the scholastic world, we learn with our whole bodies, our ears, hands, eyes, and mouths. Yet in school, we are often taught to only learn with our eyes and ears. We become silent participants in our education. In many public schools, the means of education is more like a bank transaction than a learning experience. Paulo Freire refers to this means or method of facilitating education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed as the "banking" concept of education. “In which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits in which the patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (Freire Chap. 2, pg.2). Therefore, the means of facilitating education must be revised to fit the needs those being taught. The outdated, largely inapplicable system must be torn down and a new, more hands-on approach learning must be set up in its place, just as dilapidated buildings must be gutted and restored with new, more intuitive and efficient materials.
Going back to the idea that education does begin in the home and in the world outside of school, I thinks it’s important to understand how different the methods and language used to foster education are from that of the ones employed in school. Rachel Jones’ essay “What’s Wrong With Black English?” touches on these differences by highlighting the differences between academic language and discourse used in the home, particularly of African-Americans. It appears as if the two languages being taught, African American or Black English and Standard English, often do not work against each other during the education process. What is widely used and accepted, even encouraged in the home and on the street is not suitable within the academic or professional world, or vice versa. In fact, Jones points out that “for many blacks Standard English is not only unfamiliar, it is socially unacceptable” (Jones, 150). The conflict between black or African American English and standard English within the school system is yet another example of a much larger contradiction between how we learn in our natural environment versus our education in a school setting.