Week 2 | Questions about Education

The weeks reading from the anthology focuses heavily on education. Chapter 19 and 20 both focuses on Teacher training and limitations of the current higher education system. Going further, chapters 3 and 15 talks about how even existing forms of theater and performance outside of western power will veer its way there during educational distribution. And a common thread between this entire collection of essays invoking of an issue: higher education does not properly teach future scholars how to teach, resulting in a delivery of content resembling a Western Canon. 

The issue still is both an economic one, on which we discussed in week 1, but also a rhetorical one, as a trend since the issue of college as universal right has been more widespread. With the notion that college is a stepping stone to "the rest of your life". We are negotiating between a source that wants to eliminate injustice and democratize and liberate through a search for multiple truths with a system that wants to commercialize education within a production timeline. this fits within our first weeks discussion as well, as there was a moment in talking about liberalism and democracy. using these two poles, we can get closer both a reason behind the complexity of the economic denotation but also the rhetorical one. For liberalism to work, everyone individual would need to see themselves as a person with agency and unimpeded. For democracy to work, all persons would need to agree to policy that move us together in unison. As a result, we have a "Canon" that wants to collectively say that this is a "gist" of what has been done, and a desire to also say that it doesn't best represent what's been done in its completion.  

I would argue that education cannot be the sole way that a Canon is to either form or to dismantle a Canon, but it can be a way to consider what exist beyond the "syllabi of life". Once the student leaves the class, many end their educational lives, transitioning to a life that only has marginal learning and maybe even marginal resistance to content that the rest of their lives encounter. We need to have students, of any age, inside or outside of their formal institutional education, to want to learn, and to see that experience as ultimately beneficial outside of getting a job. If that happens, Canons don't need to exist, and education can take a step outside of quotas and evaluations. Which will leak down to literary and theatrical canons that are being taught. my hope is to find out my own solution to get there by the end of this semester. 

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