Turning Play To Work Summary

According to Barry Schwartz and his writing, “The Debasing of Education: Turning Play into Work,” there are two main types of learning, performance-oriented and mastery-oriented (Schwartz, Barry). Depending on the subject and what I was learning, I have been both. When I was taking my high school classes, most of the time my learning was performance-oriented. I did not really care about how well I learned something as long as for the time being I could regurgitate the information well enough to get a good grade and then forget it. Most of my outside of school learning has been mastery-oriented. When doing something I enjoy, I try and do it as well as I can no matter how many tries it takes or how frustrated I get simply because of the satisfaction …show more content…
The reading we have done in this class, specifically the “Why Work?” reading by Dorothy Sayers, has helped me realize the course objective asking if I understand the characteristics of a liberally educated person. To me, what I have learned about having a liberal arts college education, means that I have the responsibility to myself and others to seek out what I am good at and how it can help the world. The “Why Work?” reading fits into this for me because the author stresses the importance of finding the right kind of people for each job, and how people in general should be willing to actively search inside themselves to find what they love and are good at in order to benefit the world and society while fulfilling their vocation. According to Dorothy Sayers in “Why Work?”, “the worker’s first duty is to serve the work.” The result of being liberally educated means that I should be able to serve my work and understand what that means in the context of going out in the community not just to better it but also myself. I feel that I have gained that understanding of the course