Parker Response
“An idiot is suicidal in a certain way, definitely self-defeating; for the idiot does not know that privacy and individual autonomy are entirely dependant on the community.”
In American society people have become extremely self absorbed. Over consumption and greed are moving our citizens towards idiocy. Many Americans have lost their sense of community. A large percentage of Americans don’t even vote. In order to strengthen the democracy in which we live, we need to change our concept of community. As future teachers, this is something we can start to do in our classrooms, with our own students.
According to Parker, “puberty is the transition to public life”. Puberty is seen as a time for individuals to grown and shift from idiocy into the public sphere. As a future high school teacher I will be surrounded by adolescence going through this change in life. This is a crucial time in the development of teens. They discover their responsibilities and their role in society and democratic life. It will be one of my responsibilities to ensure that they develop into involved citizens. In order to maintain the freedom and liberty in which they live they must be active citizens. “idiots are idiotic precisely because they are indifferent to the conditions and contexts of their own freedom”.
According to Parker, schools are on the right path to educating for citizenship but they are not entirely there yet. As a future teacher I will have the ability to educate for citizenship. In my opinion, this can be done by instilling the values of democracy in your students with the activities and lessons you do in class. You can plan lessons to include the values of democratic life. Getting your students to participate in an activity that could impact the entire community is a perfect way to do this. If you can get a student to cause real change in the community you may be able to teach them the importance of democracy, community, and citizenship. You can fight idiocy in America by simply starting in your own classroom. This is after all the best place to start and will most likely bring about the most change in our society.
2 comments:
I think you hit it right on the head when you stated that people in society have become completely self absorbed, which has led to a lot of Americans losing their sense of comunity. I think that it is possible to demonstrate community and citizenship in the classroom through activities, but I also think that doing so and making a lasting impact may be difficult when everything else in society is moving away from those issues. For example, how often are people stating "I have my rights!!!" While this is true, and people have their rights, how often do those rights leave others behind only to put yourself first? I think you have good aspirations though, and I'd be interested in hearing about certain ways specifically as to how you could incoporate community building strategies in your classroom.
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