Vision Statement
A Culture of Learning: New Mexico Junior College
In modern day America, the focus on being a hard-worker, making a lot of money, and being socially popular are considered essential to achieve a certain standard of political and economic success. Many Americans still hold the concept of being wealthy only in the financial sense; and thus the spiritual element remains withheld entirely from academic, intellectual, or other "mind" pursuits (Elias 2008). The separation of mind (intellectual pursuits), body (practical, Calvinistic matters), and spirit (the examination and appreciation of meaning) has seriously degraded the average American's ability to use their intuitive, creative reasoning powers to keep their cold, systematic reasoning capabilities sharp, elastic, and progressive. As a result of this causation, the American public is largely anti-intellectual, and so are its students. Through nurturing student interest in internal, versus external, issues, the hope is to eventually change the reason why students go to college, and then their daily lifestyle as a college student. The college will be a better place for both professors and students if the noted social change is executed: teachers will go into classrooms fully aware that every student is looking to merely go into a trade, i.e. not to "learn," or to pursue more intellectual issues; students will be around other like-minded students; and the students who are enrolled in the traditional university/intellectual programs will receive like intellectual stimulation and instruction. At New Mexico Junior College, the climate can still be one of a learning culture through a complete restructuring of its administration and academic policies, outlined below.
The key stakeholders and decision makers involved in this social change implementation are the school board members. Resistance I expect to find from the decision makers...
As Elias (2008) said: "in an anti-intellectual culture, most students would be anti-intellectual as would most teachers and employers" (Elias, 2008, p. 111). To overcome these barriers, I would do prior research to ensure that I could articulate this social change in a way that would not compromise the stakeholders' positions in the community and larger administrative profession.
The social change that needs to take place is the public respect for these "mind" and "spirit" engagements, without which the "body," everyday habits lacks mental and emotional sustenance. As Pedicino (2008) eloquently expresses: "I hope that students leave my classroom with a sense of awe and wonder about what science can and is trying to explain, predict, and understand" (p. 10). This sense of awe in knowledge is part of what I propose is necessary in our schools for true growth and development to take place. I propose implementing this social change by first giving the students who express or show a genuine interest in learning for the sake of learning their own programs and/or institutions, where instructors also share a similar point-of-view. It is likely that without a new system intended on preserving, nurturing, and caring for humanistic studies, we the community and future of education are creating a one-dimensional kind of intelligence that will not bode well in the face of future problem-solving needs. Moreover, without the philosophic or poetic attitude in society, communities lose a sort of secular spirit element, lacking the conviction to care about anything beyond what it can do for them, socially or otherwise.
The current results I obtained are research studies and articles on the cause and effect of anti-intellectualism among students and the general American culture (Laverghetta 2010). The…
