Recount Text (Advanced Reading)

Indah Pareza (18019027)

Monika Tagugurad (18019025)

Marta Rotua Sitohang (18019023)

Text by Sheena Gillespie and Robert Becker (Across Cultures: A Reader for Writers Eight
Edition) page 143, chapter 4.

Education

HUMAN BEINGS SHOW A WONDERFUL capacity to learn and unlearn-if it were not
so you would see such diversity in this and in all the other chapters of this book. “The greatest
happiness of man as a thinking being,” said Goethe, “is to know what is knowable and quietly to
revere what is unknowable.” Several cross-cultural texts clearly support the Goethe's notion of
the joy of learning, including the old folktale “The Bar of Gold,” “A View from the Bridge,”
“Always Living in Spain,” and “Poets in the Kitchen.”

In “A View from the Bridge,” Cherokee Paul McDonald recounts a chance encounter
with a remarkable young boy with whom he established a relationship, however brief. Through
this experience he is able to revive a sense of wonder about what we are can learn if we maintain
curiosity and are open to possibilities. Taneisha Grant in “When the Simulated Patient Is for
Real” contrasts what she learned theoretically about treating a complex patient as opposed to
treating one in actuality Like McDonald, she also learned something about herself through this
encounter.

Education is also an important issue to politicians, educators, and parents, and the
pendulum swings back and forth constantly as to what aspects of the educational system should
be reevaluated. Light is on assessment and measuring students’ performance through a series of
standardized tests beginning in third grade and continuing through college.
 Another “hot” issue is bilingual education, a matter of controversy in several states
despite the large numbers of students in public schools for whom English is not a first language.
Critics of bilingual education claim that this approach delays the acquisition of English and a
student’s ability to achieve proficiency in the language of public discourse. The more extreme
groups view bilingualism as a threat to national unity, and that has prompted the formation of
English-only movements.

Defenders of bilingualism argue that forcing students to abandon their private language is
pedagogically unsound, and often psychologically debilitating. For example, Eva Hoffman,
forced to leave her native Poland in 1959 at age thirteen, describes in her memoir, Lost in
Translation, the trauma of linguistic dispossession as she struggled to learn English in school in
Vancouver, Canada. “Blind rage, helpless rage is rage that has no words-rage that overwhelms
one with darkness.”

Several texts in this chapter focus on the crucial and controversial implications of the
connections between language and culture. Is it desirable and possible for public schools to
perform this mission with out robbing students of their Christmas language and culture? Is it
possible to achieve biculturalism, as well as bilingualism? Is it possible to tolerate - even respect
- other religions, systems of law, forms of art, and languages without losing respect for one's
own? Is our idea of culture clear and distinct enough to speak of absolute boundaries between
cultures? If we accept the concept of cultural differences, even cultural boundaries, is cultural
exclusiveness the goal we want to pursue?

In “Always Living in Spanish,” Marjorie Agosín talks about the “solitude of exile” that
she has experienced since leaving her native Chile (then under the dictatorship of the Pinochet
regime), and her years at a high school in Georgia where her “poor English and accent were the
cause of ridicule and insult.” José Torres emphasizes the importance of education and the link
between language and power, and Chang-Rae Lee recalls his mother’s powerlessness expressed
by her silence as a Korean immigrant in the United States.

Is a person educated who knows only his or her own culture as it is at that moment?
Carlos Fuentes, the eminent contemporary Mexican writer would respond negatively, as he is
convinced that “cultures only flourish in contact with others; they perish in isolation.” Anyone
who knows the history of his or her own culture expects change. But at what price? By what
vehicle? The preparation for the global culture of the twenty-first century certainly requires your
generation to forge new definitions of an educated person.

Perspectives

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale worth telling at all.

- Alastair Reid
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
- Etie Wiesel
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember, I do and I understand.
-Chinese proverb
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
-B.F.Skinner
Sexist language, racist language, theistic language-all are typical of the policing languages of
mastery, and cannot, do not, permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

-Toni Morison
Learning to read books-or pictures, or films-is not just a matter of acquiring information from
texts, it is a matter of learning to read and write the texts of our lives.

-Robert Scholes
What I wish for all students is some release from the clammy grip of the future. I wish them a
chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as grim
preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to trip and fall, to learn that
defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.

-William Zinsser
Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that the order: it is a process, a never-
ending one.
-Bel Kaufman
Education is hanging around until you've caught on.
 -Robert Frost
Put yourself in a different room, that's what the mind is for.
-Margaret Atwood

Teachers are the door. You enter yourself.

-Chinese Proverb
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
-William Butler Yeats
I am still learning.
-Michelangelo
Shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to recognize that you know it,
and when you do not know a thing, to recognize that you do not know it. That is knowledge. –

-Confucius
Education! Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to
suppress?

-D. H. Lnrence
By doubting we are led to inquire: By inquiry we perceive the truth.
-Abelard
The greatest difficulty in education is to get experience from ideas.
-George Santayana
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
I have always come to life after coming to books.
-Jorge Luis Borges
Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to
have one's part matter.

-Carolyn Heilbrun.
…That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life,
but in a new way.

-Doris Lessing
Knowledge is power.
-Francis Bacon
The mind is an enchanting thing.
-Marianne Moore
But it is not hard work which is dreary; it is superficial work. That is always boring in the long
run, and it has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so
little stress is ever laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it
adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated.

-Edith Hamilton
It ought to be embarrassing, in this age of celebration of America's diversity, that the schools
have been so slow to move toward teaching about our nation's diverse religious traditions ...
After all, if the material is well taught, many children will be intrigued by what will be for many
of their first exposure to religious traditions different from their own-or, in some instances, to
any religious traditions at all.

-Stephen L. Carter