This is a short reflective post about this class, and not my final reflective post. I've been working on this for a few weeks and just realized I never posted it.
One thing that has bothered me for a long time about schools and education is the way that we are encouraged to think for ourselves, and then denied the opportunity. We are taught, not to synthesize, but to summarize. I'm sure most of us have been in classes where we were supposed to research an assigned topic, then take quotes and ideas from "real" authors (sometimes we are even told what authors to use), summarize them on paper, and turn in our own work*.
*Provided that our own work is entirely based on and sourced from other authors. "Real" authors. Who know what they're talking about. Because we so clearly don't.
Now, don't get me wrong, I fully appreciate the value of being well-researched; I'm a chess player, and you can't do that very well if you haven't thoroughly researched openings, middlegames, and so forth. I've given well-researched presentations, and I've given presentations on the fly, and I have noticed the palpable difference between the two.
And yet.
And yet, being properly researched and sourced and cited has relatively little bearing on actually being, y'know, accurate. People throw quotes from authority figures around and expect others to be impressed. I don't mean to bash, I do it too. With a little work, though, I could find quotes from famous, authoritative people that are entirely wrong, and if no one thinks to question what I'm saying, because I have sources, then I could convince a lot of people, and still be entirely wrong.
Just because Einstein, Nietzsche, Lincoln, Marx, Plato/Socrates, Aristotle, Churchill, or [insert your authority figure here] said it at some point doesn't mean it's true.
I feel like there's a tendency to implicitly trust authority, and to assume that you don't have it. I (kind of) appreciate the value of a good research paper, and I (sort of) agree that they are good exercises in researching facts as opposed to constantly composing opinion papers, but I have felt like the message I was receiving was that if another author hasn't already said it, I'm not allowed to think or write it. It even went so far once that a teacher said to me, "This is really good, who said this?" and when I responded that it was my own interpretation of what I had read, he marked me down. Literally seconds after he had complimented the reasoning.
Setbacks in our ebook aside, I have very much appreciated that this class has given us back a little bit of that authorial authority (related words, btw) that I feel is so lacking in our education system. I feel like the problems in composition classes I've described above are indicative of one of the biggest problems in our education system; we spend so much of our time learning to repeat information back to our teachers, as it was told to us our as we read it, and we spend so little learning to solve problems and do things in the real world. In the real world, I will likely find it more useful to know how to convey my own ideas in writing than how to summarize article after endless, boring article of what everyone else thinks. I don't think our education system is bad or worthless like some people do, but I do feel like the focus is far too often in very wrong places.
And, I compliment Professors Burton and Zapalla (I've never been able to spell that correctly) for doing their best to make us come up with research and then...say what *we* think.
This isn't the best copy of the article, but the first part of this was written by Professor Burton and is important reading for college students, I think.
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