Education

Reading the Fine Print

“Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t” (Seeger). So which is more important? What would be the best way to learn, formal education or through experience? Jon Spayde once said, “The whole world’s a classroom” (65). He’s not the only one that thinks that way. Mike Rose, in “Lives on the Boundary,” argues that education should have a wider definition and that student’s cultural backgrounds should be taken into account by educators. Although formal education is important, it is also necessary to integrate outside supplements such as Gardner’s eight intelligences and fast/slow learning methods, to enhance a student’s learning experience.

Often times, school systems teach using the “banking system”, a term coined by Allan Bloom, of feeding students information and only expecting the regurgitation of the same facts. However, throughout time, there have always been great minds who taught, not using a feeding line, but through asking probing questions. That method is called the Socratic Method. It engages the mind and forces the student to think critically. This allows the students to use their creativity to solve problems. The Montessori method takes certain subjects a student excels in and cultivates it into something they can use in the future. Howard Gardner takes those manifestations of varying levels and labels the plethora of intelligences. He lists eight different intelligences: linguistic, logic-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal and intrapersonal. All these different methods are important, but many times only formal education is taught in school.

Mike Rose shows the necessity of challenging students to think through the use of real life stories. The stories he uses are of less fortunate students; these students were poor or emigrated from other countries. A lot of times, those students are not used to the formal education used in the schools, and...