Informal Writing Assignment 1.

It Isn’t Just Black and White

The start to our English 101 class was really watching a video describing the issues that schools have with filtering out creativity. This has helped me re-think my views on Public Education. At first I was really under this impression that Education really is something black and white. School just came naturally to me and I never really thought of the issues that some people face with learning.

In the TED talk, it really describes how we begin our schooling focusing on almost everything. I remember during my years in kindergarten and first grade, up until 5^th grade really, Physical Education was required, along with some kind of fine arts such as orchestra, band or choir. After that middle school didn’t require fine arts anymore and we really started focusing on subjects like science or math. High school was the worst, with only one year of physical education required, no fine arts required or languages, students really were forced to pick a path that focused on one half of our brain.

Gatto talks about the problems that we have with Education and the public school systems that we have and he is right on target with the fact that there is an issue. Our school systems do promote a certain kind of learning. Until we are educated about this matter though, and we are capable of educating others about this there will be no change. We can’t rely on others to change the school systems while we sit on the sidelines. It’s important to take issues like this seriously, the problems of not focusing on fine arts, the fact that we’re not taking into consideration the fact that some students learn differently. There have been numerous studies that show that students all learn differently whether it’s kinesthetic, auditory or visual. We shouldn’t ignore what Gatto or Sir Ken Robinson say. We should build on that and educate ourselves so we can educate others and promote the change we want to see in our schools.