The value of education

I like your topic proposal about the experience of teaching others. Please DO NOT use any reference. It should just be a personal experience. Paolo Freire writes extensively about what he perceives to be the shortcomings of traditional educational systems. Among the critiques he makes is the claim that the “banking model” of education creates a schism between education and the real lives of students, one that interferes with the students “becoming fully human.” In so doing, Freire also articulates an argument about the value and purpose of education. As many of you are preparing to leave the university in the near future, the prompt asks you to think carefully about the connection between your education and your life, and also about your own sense—now that one major stage of your education is nearing an end—of the value of education. Your task is to write a paper in which you define and describe what you believe the value of education is. In order to help you avoid the perils of abstraction, you should focus your paper on whatever you believe is the single most important educational experience you have had during the time you’ve been in college. You do not need to limit yourself to writing about an academic experience, but can focus on any life event or experience that has shaped you in an important way as a thinker or person (this will be our shorthand for “educational experience”). You will begin your process by thinking about this experience—not about the value of education. Your job is to explore, through prewriting, the details of this experience so that you can come to understand (for yourself, and ultimately for the readers of the paper you will then write) what you believe the value of education is. After you have generated material by prewriting, you will begin to draft the paper in which you develop this idea. Freire says that education should make people fully human. Your primary goal is to convey to the reader a clear, specific sense of what you think the value of education is—what education is good for, or what it should do for people. Your evidence for the paper will come from the details of the experience you choose to focus on. Clearly, you will need to give your reader a detailed sense of what you experienced, and why it was (and continues to be) so significant in your development. Keep in mind, though, that this should not be a self-centered narrative. You are not just describing what happened to you. Instead, the ultimate purpose of discussing your experience is to help you make a larger specific claim about the value of education. I am not prescribing a specific genre for the paper. It could be a narrative essay (like the Mike Rose essay ) Download Mike Rose essay ), a letter to the Chancellor, an argumentative paper, etc. Of course, depending upon the form you adopt, you will need to make different rhetorical choices in order to meet your readers’ needs. You may find that you need to employ narrative, description, reflection and other modes of writing to relate your experience. You should also think carefully about the organization of your paper. For example, although a narrative paper might involve some degree of storytelling, a paper that follows a strictly chronological organization is likely to be ineffective. Whatever story or stories you tell must serve a purpose, and this purpose should determine the organization of your paper. Regardless of its form, the success of your paper will depend upon presenting clear, specific details and helping the reader to understand the significance of these details; your paper should also interest the reader and engage his or her intellect and imagination. You will necessarily have to use the first person pronoun in this paper. You should not include in your paper any sentence that sounds like “The most important educational experience I have had is…” You should not mention Freire in your paper at all, nor should you conduct any outside research.