Imagine hypothetical situation: two people are supposed to describe the color green. One of them speaks about the color of moss. The other about apples. What determines what’s going to be the first, intuitive response? Social background. No mater the effort, every human is bound by the way of thinking of his native society. The liberal education, although aspiring to the noble goals of wisdom and equality, is a victim to its social background as well. Therefore, the social bias, present in the required CORE readings, proves that the school’s goal of critical and creative thinking will never be fully attainable – questions will never be challenging enough and thoughts will never be creative enough.
First, the readings reflect only upon the …show more content…
The flagship example of that is The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By serving as the advocate for the repressed ones from all the countries, the authors reroute the problem of the suppressed society into purely intellectual class conflict, which, aside from stating the main problems of the working class, does not really express feelings of everyday people. To state that the workers need change is insufficient – to model their behaviors is to wrongly put them in the restrains of the intellectual thought. Therefore, Marx and Engels’ assumption of unionization as a way to gather the whole working class is ideologically idealistic.1 Even after 170 years, while analyzed from the perspective of workers, only 1 in 10 of them belong to the unions2. Simultaneously, most of that 10% has some level of education, as opposed to immigrant and private sector workers3. This shows that, after almost two centuries, the idea of unionization is still limited to somewhat educated part of the working class, proving how marxist ideology is attractive only to the intellectual part of the society. Therefore, a student learning about the condition of workers …show more content…
Modernity, a result of human creation, by definition is regulated by the standards of the society. Therefore, its most prominent work inevitably must be acknowledged by the majority of experts in the field at some point in history. Thus, for a work to be considered important, majority has to agree on that claim, no longer making it avant-garde. Hence, while analyzing the “big” works of the modernity, they become controversial only by definition, while in reality they are actually the most mainstream representatives of their genre. Furthermore, as students are presented only with these essential yet moderate elements of art, they never actually come across the true avant-garde, what directly questions their ability to think creatively, since throughout their whole education they were somewhat kept “inside the box.”A confirmation of this claim may be found in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Although certainly challenging to an average reader, even at the moment of publication it was not radically modern. The stream of consciousness, particularly visible in Peter Walsh’s reflections after leaving Clarissa’s home4, is not unique nor innovative. In fact, Leo Tolstoy in 1878 uses the exact same technique in Anna Karenina. However, Mrs Dalloway, being shorter, more Westernized and aesthetically pleasing, turned out to be the one entering the
First, the readings reflect only upon the …show more content…
The flagship example of that is The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By serving as the advocate for the repressed ones from all the countries, the authors reroute the problem of the suppressed society into purely intellectual class conflict, which, aside from stating the main problems of the working class, does not really express feelings of everyday people. To state that the workers need change is insufficient – to model their behaviors is to wrongly put them in the restrains of the intellectual thought. Therefore, Marx and Engels’ assumption of unionization as a way to gather the whole working class is ideologically idealistic.1 Even after 170 years, while analyzed from the perspective of workers, only 1 in 10 of them belong to the unions2. Simultaneously, most of that 10% has some level of education, as opposed to immigrant and private sector workers3. This shows that, after almost two centuries, the idea of unionization is still limited to somewhat educated part of the working class, proving how marxist ideology is attractive only to the intellectual part of the society. Therefore, a student learning about the condition of workers …show more content…
Modernity, a result of human creation, by definition is regulated by the standards of the society. Therefore, its most prominent work inevitably must be acknowledged by the majority of experts in the field at some point in history. Thus, for a work to be considered important, majority has to agree on that claim, no longer making it avant-garde. Hence, while analyzing the “big” works of the modernity, they become controversial only by definition, while in reality they are actually the most mainstream representatives of their genre. Furthermore, as students are presented only with these essential yet moderate elements of art, they never actually come across the true avant-garde, what directly questions their ability to think creatively, since throughout their whole education they were somewhat kept “inside the box.”A confirmation of this claim may be found in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Although certainly challenging to an average reader, even at the moment of publication it was not radically modern. The stream of consciousness, particularly visible in Peter Walsh’s reflections after leaving Clarissa’s home4, is not unique nor innovative. In fact, Leo Tolstoy in 1878 uses the exact same technique in Anna Karenina. However, Mrs Dalloway, being shorter, more Westernized and aesthetically pleasing, turned out to be the one entering the