Students and Education
When sociologists and scholars look at education, they tend to ignore and generalize the biggest variable: the student. According to Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, your years as a student are there for society to mold you into the citizen it wants you to be (Bloom 422). Gregory Mantsios considers a student a product of whom their parents were, as spelled out in his article Class in America (Mantsios 482). Luckily, there are educators like Deborah Tannen out there who have made it their duty to try to convince other educators that students are not a creature of hive mind, and that applying one method of learning or theory of education to every student as a whole is a bad approach (Tannen 541). While it is important to have an idea of how to approach teaching and education in general, generalizing the students themselves will result in nothing more than failing them in the end. …show more content…
This leaves the students with little choice in their own actions, and makes students pick between the things they love to do, instead of letting them decide what is important for them to know. While scholars like Bloom can recognize that there are at least two different kinds of students, they very rarely formulate their theories on education and higher learning on more than a base generalization of students (Bloom 424). This is a blatant disregard for the people that these scholars are trying to decide the future of, and is little better than a doctor disregarding a patient’s symptoms and medical history based on their age and
When sociologists and scholars look at education, they tend to ignore and generalize the biggest variable: the student. According to Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, your years as a student are there for society to mold you into the citizen it wants you to be (Bloom 422). Gregory Mantsios considers a student a product of whom their parents were, as spelled out in his article Class in America (Mantsios 482). Luckily, there are educators like Deborah Tannen out there who have made it their duty to try to convince other educators that students are not a creature of hive mind, and that applying one method of learning or theory of education to every student as a whole is a bad approach (Tannen 541). While it is important to have an idea of how to approach teaching and education in general, generalizing the students themselves will result in nothing more than failing them in the end. …show more content…
This leaves the students with little choice in their own actions, and makes students pick between the things they love to do, instead of letting them decide what is important for them to know. While scholars like Bloom can recognize that there are at least two different kinds of students, they very rarely formulate their theories on education and higher learning on more than a base generalization of students (Bloom 424). This is a blatant disregard for the people that these scholars are trying to decide the future of, and is little better than a doctor disregarding a patient’s symptoms and medical history based on their age and