Dharamjeet Singh
Professor Gibbons
Eng-002
11/21/13
Education-A need for Humans
Education is important. Yes. We all know it. It’s important to those who value it. To me Education is beautiful. It’s our key to unlock and see the most beautiful things on earth. We need it to appreciate Literature, art, science. In short, you are not fully human or cannot be called a human being if you didn’t take the time to educate yourself. We educate ourselves at a young age by going to schools and learning from different teachers. And we become different when we get older by the education we had when we were young. It’s very important that we know what kind of education we get. Let me put it this way; when we do business or buy something we carefully examine the product or business and wonder how it may be beneficial for us or how much profit we can make from it. We must choose educational ideas and methods that can benefit in our future lives.
We reach a point in our life when we or rather our parents have to decide what kind of education they want for their children. In Article 26 of the “Universal Declaration of Humans Rights,” it states “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” There are many kinds of education we can choose in the world. Will we choose the old Narrative way of education where the teacher teaches and the student memorizes and that’s it? The great Brazilian Educator and Philosopher Paulo Freire describe it as the “The Banking Concept of Education.” In this way, Education becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Why must students sit in class and not say anything? They are paying a whole lot of money so who gives anybody the right to say ‘just sit and don’t talk.’ Professors are in a large auditorium, practically preaching, to hundreds of students who seem like robots. They are either taking notes by hand or laptop, sleeping, staring as if everything was being absorbed in their brain, or just purely not paying attention. The most dangerous thing is that teachers consider themselves as superior and the students regarded as inferior. We certainly don’t want such young children in an environment where they get an Authoritarian Education. It has been proved that Egalitarian Education is the best environment to start your education. We can see why Education is an important factor because to choose a good education for their children, the parents themselves must be educated. To make sure our next generation gets the right way of education we ourselves have to be educated first.
So who needs education? Humans of course. It’s our right as humans to get an education. Again we can find it in the Article 26 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” that everyone has the right to get an education. No one can be denied an education because of the person’s gender, skin color or sexual orientation. We can see that even now, in some Middle Eastern countries women are not allowed to get an education. Girls are forced to get married by their parents at the age of ten. The parents uneducated as they are, follow their religious and old customs blindly. Therefore, it results in such happenings.
Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights says in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ‘“Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous, as men become more so; for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one half of the human race are obliged to submit to, retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of men will be worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet.” She points out that, women are entitled to an education consistent with their position in society; the role they are expected to play became even more critical to the nation. Indeed, if they already educate children, instead of being relegated to the
