Writing Assignment

What role should schools and schooling play in the United States? In a democracy? For as long as we can remember schooling in the United States has been a strong aspect of the country. Despite the many changes and problems within the system through history, have they served the people of this country efficiently with equipped education to better themselves? What should be the school’s means for delivering efficient education? These are the question I will attempt to discuss briefly in relation to a quote by Thomas Jefferson spoken in 1820, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.” (Jefferson in Tyak, D., 2003 p. 9)

I believe Jefferson is saying that the powers of society should be nowhere else but in the hands of the people. If some believe that the people are not adequately prepared to know what to do with those powers, they should not be taken away but instead be given education to help them make decisions regarding their power as a society. The underlying question here is that, did schooling actually begin to provide citizens with sufficient education as a means to better them as a society? If not, have schools changed today towards doing so now? I think Jefferson is saying this should be the initial role of schools in the US, however have we been genuinely educated for better use of our judgment or freedom of choice, or have we been educated into using our discretion in a way that our thinking becomes limited only going as far as the education we received. In other simpler words, education used as a form of brainwashing. In Jefferson’s time education was used as a follow up after war for instance, a means to change the minds of people and get them to do or think certain ways.

We can see throughout history schooling has not always been for the better for all children in the US, and in some cases the same remains for today. In terms of societal problems with inequality, civil rights, economic handicaps, and other issues with societies in the States, schooling has definitely not always played the role Jefferson points out sufficiently. For example before the civil rights movements, black children in the U.S. were given the low end of education that could not do anything but discourage their dispositions. Furthermore, in certain circumstances today some children, who come from families with lower income, are not given the same educational opportunities that children from higher income families are receiving. Also even within education there are circumstances with the use textbooks, bias teaching, and others also that could be an argumentative approach to schooling being a brainwashing tool. For instance some claim that the use of textbooks hinders further learning, but students are only learning from one point of view perspective. Noah Webster believed that European textbooks were giving the wrong impression to students, encouraging them to think the wrong things opposing US thinking, and therefore the system needed to come up with our own textbooks. Now that we’ve done that, in some cases these books are not broadening thinking but still pushing on individual’s perspective on a subject.

So again, I think that Jefferson was pointing in the right direction for our country through what he said in his statement, but I think schooling possibly may not have committed to its true role in the United States. However I also do not think it is too late to make a change to getting us back on the right path as future partners to schooling in the US. I think Emerson’s philosophy of education is a model for how education in the US should be for students. Briefly describing, his idea is that the mind is boundless in that it can take in everything, action being the best way to learn because it is not the product of creation but the creative process that stimulates the mind and finally, just as I have pointed out, books should be secondary tools to learning because they have become misused in many cases. I believe we once had this in US education and we have strayed from it, and if we could stress these importances more there would be a lot of positive changes in US education.