It presents education as a chance to discover ourselves and contribute to society. The basic message of his speech was that "Education is the road to sucess" and if you want to go somewhere in life, you have to have a good education. This is our society's basic answer for getting job, a career, and learning about what we want out of life.
In Obama's Speech, he addresses student responsibility to their education and wants students to put their effort in it. I don't see any harm in it, if you are using education to get a job, which most people are, you may as well put effort into it and be good at what you do. That is the basic premise of having an education in this country, that with good grades and a degree, it'll get you the career you want.
"We have a responsibility to ourself to discover what it that is" and find out what we are good at, which is something that going to school and doing well in it is supposed to help you do. Which I think it does along the subject areas we take in school because we find out what we like and develop our perferecnes. I feel like education is taken for granted, perhaps because it is so freely given it doesn't seem like a priviledge anymore, because it wasn't a choice, it was something we have to do, people usually value things more when they actually had to invest something to get it or if they feel like they chose something for themselves. "There is no excuse for not trying." He says that by not putting your effort in your education akin to letting yourself and your country down that's because education is our society's answer for what roles we are going to play in our lives.
Thomas Friedman
Education is in part capitalism--or at least it is partially what it is for. We see school as a place for learning and what are we learning for? To get a job. According to Thomas Friedman, traditional schools trains students to become employees and there should be an alternative school for entrepeneurs. It sets schools as the standard to having a prosperus society and that it needs to improve on school to help fix the current rate of unemployment. This is like what we said in class about people trying to fix institutions to fix society or in this case the economy. That perhaps if we created a new school that catered to entrepeneurs it would benefit students who wanted to be the bosses of businesses rather the employees. If they are focusing on the structure of schools and the way its structured and creating a more military structure with more emphasis on memorization, I think it'll be more like schools in Asia, that focus more on rote memorization as well. I don't know if having a school like this would automatically mean the creation of more jobs, but it might help. I think though if a school like this were to exist and work, parents would choose to send their kids there rather than a regular school because they would perfer if their kid was a boss rather than an entrepeneur. Its easier to attempt to fix the smaller problems through institutions and hope that by doing that there is a trickle up affect than to attempt to fix the larger problem by itself because fixing an institution is a more viable step for people.
I think the top priorities of schools should be to try to foster a love of learning in their students, because once they accomplish that, the rest would be made much simpler if they actually want to learn and want to get better and grow as people and individuals. I think that's what this article is about, how this woman, Deborah Kenny, tries to create an environment where this is possible. Since this is a society that relies on this sort of system economically, socially, and in some ways mentally, then we should make this an institute worth going to and where kids can actually learn from. She focuses on developing good teachers, in addition to the cirriculum. Realistically, its not going to be perfect, but I do think having that sort of environment does affect the students and encourages them to try because students feed off the teacher and vise versa. In the summer, I got a job working with kids and part of the job training I had was be aware of our attitude, because our attitude affected the childs. We should try to encourage the kids to play in a group game, by wanting to play ourselves and being enthusiastic, because if a child sees you have a "oh this is boring" attitude, they'll copy you and adopt it and not play, but if you get up and do it, they'll copy that instead. Kids are very influencable, especially when they're younger, but even when they're older they're still like that. They can read what you're giving off. So, I think this is reasonable, that is something school is able to do, its not going to correct all the problems of our society, but at least it can get kids to learn.
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