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¶ … Conversation -- "Undemocratic Curriculum"
This paper will argue that Gerald Graff is correct: the university and college system is secretive and vague. This secrecy, opacity, and lack of democracy ultimately contributes to the failure of students at the university level and likely in the professional realms. It is true that a portion of the responsibility to be prepared is upon the student. There is no doubt about that. Yet education, particularly in the 21st century, has increasingly failed students in preparation for and success in college. As Graff argues, there is a distinctive lack of transparency in academic at the university level and it is a problem with several systemic effects.
Graff writes:
"The college curriculum exposes students to a rich menu of disciplines courses, texts, ideas, and methods and says, in effect, 'Come and get it, but you're on your own as to what to make of it; and if you can't make much of it, it's your fault, not ours.' This state of affairs makes a travesty of democratic education, since it favors the few who come to college with some already acquired academic socialization that enables them to detect the tacit and unformulated rules of the academic game. It leaves the rest, including most low-income students, feeling that they somehow lack the mysterious quality possessed by...
We are drawn to college because of the freedom and the exposure to new people and new ideas. Our professors are there for us to a limited or certain extent, and there are even administrators on staff at universities such as career services and guidance counselors of sorts to assist students, but mostly, students are on their own. Yes, independence is an integral part of the collegiate experience, but not complete intellectual independence. How many capable college students drown in the abyss of schoolwork? The failure of higher education lies in the student preparation and the lack of democracy and transparency by the academic industrial complex.
If universities keep knowledge mysterious to a certain extent, they will draw a consistent crowd of prospective students to them each year. People are drawn to mysteries and things that evade their comprehension. What is the magical draw of Harvard University that compels students around the world to contend for admission? What is about Duke University that produces ambitious, energetic graduates, primed and ready for the workforce? This is what the marketing departments in universities are for: to generate some kind of mystique around the school that initially draws prospective students…
Later, Graff writes:
"If I am right that curricular cognitive overload is a central cause of student cluelessness, then improving education -- and closing the achievement gap -- will not be possible until academic institutions get as good at pedagogical simplification as we are at proliferating multiplicity and complication. We cannot make the curriculum more transparent -- that is more democratic -- until we are willing to be reductive about how academics is played, and this means getting over our protective queasiness about totalizing self-characterizations." (Graff, 2007,-Page 131)
Students experience sensory overload because of college. It is expected, but it is also detrimental because it is unregulated. College students literally have no idea what they are doing and the opacity of how to be successful in college is staggering. Democratic education is supposed to be when all parties participate in the decision making process together. In democratic education, the emphasis is on learning through experiences and shared activities. Democratic education says that all students of all ages and levels learn together and from each other. Crucially, students in democratic education mentor each other in intellectual and social skills. This is one of Graff's major points: college students significantly lack intellectual socialization at the college level. If democratic education exists with the free exchange of ideas, conversations, and interplay among lots of people, can we truly call the current state of university education democratic? How long can we ignore the democratic gap as much as we ignore the achievement gap?
As Peters describes, this is a revolutionary event. In his view, the creation of learning spaces, combined with the advent of the Internet will create the "future university," the "three elements" of which are "distance education," "online education," and "scholarly face-to-face discourse" (Peters 2003), thus rendering the traditional university obsolete. Chapplow (nd) reminds students that technology still has limits that humans do not in her article, "Online Higher Education." Despite
Assignment Two Black Swan is a sort of horror film, but one that we don't expect as it takes place in the world of ballet. Nina (Natalie Portman) is a ballerina who wants her chance at playing the swan in "Swan Lake," which means she will have to portray both the 'good' swan and the 'bad' swan. The problem is that she is such a good girl that nobody believes she
I recognized that the teachers might have a different perspective and wanted to learn about their views and perspective upon the testing. By the end of the conversation, I had communicated my need for consistent testing and tracking and underscored the need to meet expectations and goals regarding the use of such data as well as learned more about teacher perceptions. Had I entered into the conversation in a
Of course, the Conversation hides the true evil mastermind until the last moments of the film, when it is revealed that the Director was the victim all along. This, again, is an unusual plot twist for a conspiracy thriller. Perhaps the sting works so well because of how unexpected the twist is. If Jaws set the precedent for shady villains watching the hero's every move, the writers would have been
Interviews can certainly be shaped by culture-specific nuances, but, at the same time misunderstandings may accrue due to other factors in other words, cultural differences may not be the only or accurate attribution to communicative difficulties in interview situations. There are too many other complexities that may be responsible for initiating miscommunication. Gomperz and Cook-Gomperz (2008) distinguish between socio-linguistics and linguistic anthropology but Sarangi concludes that: "A selective characterization
Bronte and Rhys An Extended Conversation Most conversations we hold in person, sitting next to another as we travel on a train to an unknown or familiar destination, or as we enjoy a coffee break at work, or wait at a busy corner for the light to turn green. And then there are long-distance conversations, some by phone, others by instant message or email. And still others through more literary methods, with