- Formal education tends to restrain our minds and spirits rather than set them free.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
One may say that our minds and spirits tend to be rigidified rather than to become truly flexible in the process of formal education. In some sense, it is hard to deny that socialization through educational institutes may constrain the way we think, judge, and even feel. However, under the beneath, there is sufficient reason to believe that schools can serve as a true liberator of our mental world, especially in the sense that they provide various types of freedoms we need as a significant human being: freedoms from ignorance, irrational fears and superstitions, inability, and prejudices.
Of course, few would disagree that what most schools emphasize as their fundamental missions can work as a force limiting our behaviors and attitudes as members of a society. Through courses in ethics, sociology, and history, schools may (unwittingly or intentionally) instill into students’ minds what a society regards as the most desirable values. During the Cold War era, most students in both the United States and the Soviet Union were reset and re-manufactured as haters of the opposing ideologies which each country considered as a source of every evil in the world. Meanwhile, students might also become a machine who, in their blind beliefs, supports the superiority of their political systems. In general, as a builder of an ideology that a society prefers, formal education may constrict our minds and spirits, thus narrow our scopes.
Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that our mental world is bound to be ossified and restrained by every step of school learning. Through courses in sciences, logics, and mathematics, we can be truly liberated from the general ignorance, and even from the irrational propensities. Instead of being subject to medieval superstitions, we, those who have been enlightened by scientific knowledge given by schools, no longer feel unfounded fears about a number of natural disasters, diseases, or social anomalies. That is, modern educational systems, I believe, set our minds free from the traditional traps of irrationality. ------------------------
Is school a liberator for our minds and spirits, or a fetter? The given statement claims that our intellectual and cognitive lives tend to be restrained by formal education. And, at a glance, it is undeniable that rigorous academic trainings remove us from individual uniqueness in ways of thinking and judgment. However, this view seems to underestimate a number of precious liberating roles exerted by systematic learning, including freedom from ignorance and liberation from irrational instincts.
Of course, few would disagree that schools sometimes force us to follow certain ways of thinking and moral decision. With regard to formation of individuals’ value systems, formal education across many countries leads students to assimilate several beliefs to which they want their students to be attached and that they wish to perpetuate. Growing in South Korea, for example, I have been showered by such, however rigid, conformist ideologies as absolute respect for tradition, precedence of group before individual, and hostility toward Communism from a series of formal learning; because we cannot live in a social vacuum (that is, a state being separated from general ways of thinking shared by many), we need to absorb those demanded values. In this simple sense, formal education seems to circumscribe our minds in a limited boundary of “socially desirable” ideals.
Schools seem to imprison our spirits in another sense. Through their practices and conventions that are usually excused by the rationales of better competence and competitiveness among students, schools also rob us of our personal interests and unique schedules for development. Excessive emphasis on good grades or regular exams and tests can be blamed to make our intellectual lives fettered to the formal programming rather than be enjoyed and explored to our own personalities.
The speaker asserts that schools are an institution that makes our minds and spirits restrained rather than freer. In some sense, it is true that learning is a process to eliminate some types of free and autonomous thinking. However, this view seems to underestimate the various liberating effects from formal learning.
Of course, few would disagree that formal training sometimes presents subtle cages imprisoning our minds and spirits. When it comes to the function of schools as a socializing institute, it is difficult to deny that we are forced to take some ‘socially desirable’ values and political beliefs in the process of formal education. In many communist countries, for example, this means a cage of ideology is imposed to individual students, which will later work as a screen to filter out any perspective the society dislikes. If we concede that most of our embellished socio-political values come from schools, we can also agree that formal education is an institution of constraint.
However, this does not necessarily deny many other liberating functions of formal education. With regard to many practical knowledge and skills, schools are an institution that liberates us from ignorance and incompetence. If there were no modern education, we might be still in more inconvenient prison of intellectual poverty.
When it comes to the influence of instinctive prejudices, modern education also seems to be a kind liberator rather than a restraining force. By teaching us the value of tolerance toward racial, national, and gender differences, modern schools have been praised to alleviate, at least, the egregious force of diehard prejudices. Partly because of the enlightenment from schools, we no longer treat those who have different sex, religion, and skin colors with habitual hostility and fear. This also says that schools are liberators of our spirits and minds. ------------------
The speaker asserts that the primary purpose of education is not to liberate but to restrain our minds and spirits. In some sense, few would disagree that education is somewhat related to a process to confine our thinking and ways of behavior. Only by focusing on the regulating function of education, however, this approach is underestimating the various functions of education in liberating our lives including liberation from ignorance, natural environment, and/or religious and cultural blindness.
To begin with, it is difficult to deny that formal education may function more as a supervisor than a liberator to some degree. When it comes to courses in ethics and sociology, formal education tends to instill some types of values and moral standards which can be viewed as external constraints against our free wills. Especially for younger students who are usually too ‘clean’ to be critical, these value-laden classes may directly influence on their belief systems. Thus, some political scientists and psychologists have argued that education is an ‘ideological apparatus’ for the mainstream. A few radical critics even argue that, in order to be truly free, one needs to be nurtured outside of formal education.
In addition, education in several authoritarian societies serves as a secret policeman or a witch-hunter against new and reformist ideas. By defining the area of legitimate and proper thinking strictly, education in those societies tends to control the political and social philosophies; in South Korea under the military regimes during the 1970’s and 80’s, it was the strong emphasis on Anti-communism in schools that restrained the range of legitimacy in social and political ideas among citizens. Free thinkers in the societies have little ground to publicize their ideas because of the general public’s strong ideological bias, who were influenced by their narrow education system.
However, experience in formal education does not necessarily mean the loss of independence and autonomy. If so, how could there be independent and free researchers in academic world? To the contrary, without formal education and basic cognitive skills and knowledge from it, people tend to wander in darkness. One would not define freedom as “wandering without orientation.” In my opinion, free thinking can be possible only when we are enlightened with “lights” whatever their color is. ((To most young students who lack basic skills or knowledge to sustain significant reasoning, school is a place they can be equipped with valuable skills and knowledge required to live independently in their future lives.))
I believe that formal education is a liberator not only because formal education makes us free from ignorance, but also because it provides us with methods of critical and creative reasoning needed to overcome the established viewpoints. When it comes to primary ideal of modern education which emphasizes the importance of critical approach, it is emancipating rather than restraining functions that modern school is usually aimed at. Historically, with the advent of modern universities, human beings have had the true chance to be freed from the repressive medieval ideologies. Through the methodologies emphasizing the discovery of new possibilities in every aspect of human interests, we gain more knowledge to make the place of human beings more autonomous and independent from the threats of nature as well as limited understandings of the past. This also says that the profile of education should be more about liberating than restraining functions.
In sum, despite the fact that one of many functions of education is to strengthen the existing values and force certain ideologies to students, the roles of modern education in liberating people from general ignorance or existing but limited ideas tell us that education is not just the process to immure people in darkness. Therefore, I cannot fully agree to the speaker’s assertion that the main function of education is to restrain people’s minds and spirits. How could we even think about the possibility of education to restrain our spirits unless we were enlightened by it?