Week 2 - What is Education?

"Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?"
-Aldo Leopold, "March: The Geese Return" in A Sand County Almanac
with Essays on Conservation from Round River.

"Education, I fear is learning to see one thing by going blind to another."
-Aldo Leopold, "Manitoba: Clandeboye" in A Sand County Almanac
with Essays on Conservation from Round River.

“Life is large and surprising and mysterious, and we don’t know what we need to know. When I was a student I refused certain subjects because I thought they were irrelevant to the duties of a writer, and I have had to take them up, clumsily and late, to understand my duties as a man. What we need in education is not relevance, but abundance, variety, adventurousness, thoroughness. A student should suppose that he needs to learn everything he can, and he should suppose that he will need to know much more than he can learn.”

- Wendell Berry, “Think Little” [1]
[1] Ballata, Phyllis. “What is Education?” Writing from Life: Collecting and Connecting. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1997. 11 and 52.

PROJECT
Read:
Mark Twain, “Two Ways of Seeing the River”
Malcolm X with Alex Haley, “How I Discovered Words: A Homemade Education”
Loren Eisely, “The Hidden Teacher”

After Reading:
Define education from your perspective.

Write a 1-2 page essay explaining your perspective of education. Use your own experiences as a student, the points of view from the three readings, and Dead Poets Society to support your position.