The American education system is…not the best in the world, it’s still stuck in the Industrial Age. The structures of education are one of the pillars of a healthy society, as the way a society views education and engages with it on an institutional level will determine the kind of citizenry it has. At W.C.U the school has worked to modernize not only in technology but with procedures and making a shift from lecture focused classes to more interactive methods. Working towards improving education as to be in line with Paulo Freire and Walker Percy’s philosophy about teaching without teaching. In pursuit of the goal of a more egalitarian form of teaching, I propose student led labs, for teachers to better emulate the maieutic virtue by facilitating group discussion, having presentations/seminars led by students, and the removal of tests in place of experience based projects/simulations.
Applying this to say a comparative politics class for the sake of context would go as follows :Student led labs, as in the dogfish is splayed upon a table and the students go ahead and work with little more than their tools and an objective to learn. Perhaps an exercise on a topic of interest in relation to the class, for example if the class was Latin American Politics a student could decide to research something in the region related to its development and politics. Percy said that “He(consumer) carves his initials as a last desperate measure to escape his ghostly role as a consumer.” So the labs in which students find their own topics which will then be used as a base for their presentations will allow the students to reclaim their intellectual sovereignty. The labs offer practical skill learning for research data collection and team work. By students working to create something they learn. When students then present on the topic of the labs and what they found, sharing what they discovered through the fruits of their pursuit of learning. Removing the banking approach from the institution we learn by removing the object from the educational package by which the information is wrapped in. As having no instruction equalizes the dynamic of learning therefore making it not an “exercise in domination” but an exchange of information.
The role of the teacher; they do play a part in this ; is to be the midwife the facilitator that is there highest role as anything more will just be part of the educational package. In practice that would include things like asking questions which propose problems like “What could this indicator suggest? What do these factors point to?” etc.. Therefore allowing the proliferation of thought. The simulation and experience based projects would include having students go out in the field and perform the qualitative/quantitative data collection that will be routine in the field of political science. “…English major who began poking around in a dogfish with a bobby pin would learn more in thirty minutes than a biology major in a whole semester;” Experience is the best teacher after all
