Richard Wijaya
English 102
Sept 22 2015
Prof Teddy Chocos
Education
“What True Education Should Do” by Sydney J. Harris tells us his concept of education,
he wanted us to know the real purpose of education and what education really means. Harris first
talks about what most people thinks of education, that is the student is just a case and the
teachers are supposed to stuff “education”. He thinks that education is not the act of putting
knowledge into one‘s mind but taken it out of the mind. The teachers need to help the student
find out what their “intelligent” really are.
Harris prove his idea of education by quoting from Socrates and William Ernest Hocking.
This is a classic education system that the teacher “depositing” their information into the student.
In Indonesia they uses this system from middle school to high school and I’ve experienced it. I
agree with Harris, It is not a good method to use in class because it minimizes the creative power
and critical thinking of students . In the school, every students are expected to get a good grades
and listen to what the teachers says. We don’t really have to think because all the information
that we need is on the books and we just need to memorize it. I think most of the schools are
using this method. What Harris wants is that the teacher and the students learn from one another
in class. Students can improve their knowledge by asking question about what they don’t know,
and there will be a discussion about the topic. “There are pearls in each of us, if only we knew
how to cultivate them with ardor and persistence”(Harris) Eliciting information from the students
is the best way to find the pearl,and the teacher should help the student. This method helps the
student to take out the information or talent they had inside them.
At first Issac Asimov had different concept about education, he thought that the education
he had is related with the academic test and the score that he got. He used to thinks that academic
test was the one that measure your intelligent, but he changed the way he thinks when he met the
auto-repair man. “My Intelligence,then,is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in
and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an
arbiter of such matter” The auto-repair man proved to him that intelligence test wasn’t to
measure your intelligent. I agree with this because I think that intelligent cannot be measured and
it can’t be prove by doing the intelligent test because the question In the test are about the
information that the teachers gave, not about the society. “Because you’re so goddamned
educated,doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.” The repair-man mention that Asimov only
good in academic, which I think is also part of his intelligent. I believe that everybody are
intelligent, but they have different skills and it needs to be polished. Alexie passion for reading
and writing are also part of his intelligent. His thirst for books was affected by his father .He was
educating himself by reading comic books, and he tried to help other indian students that were
looked down in society.
The conclusion is that intelligent test is not how we measure our intelligent, we need to
find the things we are good at. We also need to find the right way to educate ourselves