Fangqin Li (Norris)
10/08/07
Personal Philosophy of Education Assignment
Why educate? I think it is a process of control, because people want to control each other. If you ask me why, I would probably trace it back to its original causes. How “educate” comes from, or what makes it happen. I think it begins with those people with two different opinions, perspectives or views about something. They quarrelled and argued with each other, and both of them wanted to persuade the other to believe their own opinions, and tried to win. Then debates arose. “No one is better than me”, I think that was what they thought of themselves at that time. They always believed that the other group is worse than themself, I thought. Then they tried to control the other one, and wanted to make them become their slaves. Actually, the slaves of mentalism. One of them won, and set up a system and build up a school in where they can totally pour their own theories about everything into their mental slaves. So I think, in ancient times, people educate for conquering, owning and establishing country, however, in nowadays, people educate for individual purpose, such as find a job, earn more money, or gain respect, and the like.
I think “educate” is not simple as it looks like. Although it is a verb, it contains a lots and complex things. Like who educates who, who sets up the true theories for the whole education system, and educate what, and why educate.
I think we “educate” just for constructing our own country. A country needs educated people to construct, operate, organize, manage and control it. Every coutry has its own development direction, so it has its own education system, on which people can be educated exactly the way that the government demands.
I think “educate” is something we are doing right now, but it has history and has its future as well. Take students as an example, each of them has been educated since his reasonable age. Assuming that the normal age is six or seven years old, then a college student must have had been through his elementary school, middle school or high school, which were his education history, and also might be would enter a graduate school for his master degree, which is his education future. So there is no break for their education. Everyone educate and be educated in his whole life. Just like there is no inconsistency in constructing a country.
I think “educate” serves the requirements of a country. It is an important policy of a government to control their people.
How should education be carried out?
First of all, I think, we need a powerful and independent government, which can give us a good education organization system. It must have its own independent education department, which has lots of excellent educated people. In this department, it should has several sections as many as good enough to carry education out. Each section has its own manager or leader, who can follow the education direction well, and can offer good suggestions about how to carry out education well.
I think, education should be carried out not only by a government, but also by people themselves.
Fangqin Li
10/23/07
Question of Chapter 1 to 4
Chapter1
1. Is religion bad for children?
2. Can poor children learn as much as rich children?
3. Should be traditional tasks and values of women be included in the curriculum?
4. Is the curriculum recommended by Plato-literature, history, mathematics, and philosophy-adequate for today’s students?
Chapter2
1. How should teachers formulate aims? Must students be involved in constructing objectives for their own learning? Having read Dewey’s recommendations, how do you feel about teachers establishing learning objectives for every lesson?
2. Which steps of Dewey’s problem-solving model is not necessary any more? Or do you have any idea that can improve it?
3. Does democracy depend on the transmission of common values? What should we mean by “transmission”?
4. How should “subject matter” be defined?
Chapter3
1. What does “learning is really is the end-in –view” mean?
2. How can learning not be the result?
3. Is awareness a form of learning?
4. Can teaching be separated from learning?
5. Can the concept of erotetic teaching be used to plan lessons? What questions should be the students ask?
6. Does teaching consist primarily of intellectual acts?
7. Can narrative and empirical studies be properly used in philosophical work? Are we still “doing philosophy” when we engage in such mixed methods?
8. Do real live students ask the questions they should (epistemologically) ask? What they should ask?
Chapter4
1. In what ways might you personally be responsible for what it means to be human?
2. What interests might serve as “ultimate concerns”?
3. How to use the concepts of anguish and forlornness to solve the problems of schooling?
4. What does new humanism mean? What old humanism is?
5. Is naming powerful when you are a woman?
6. How does one become part of the working class?
7. How does one judge the force of an argument?
8. What might it mean to follow Derrida’s plea to “let others be”?
Chapter 7
1. Yes, I think this claim is falsifiable, if we use the quality of these academic courses that students are taking, which will refute the claim. And it is subject to interpretation.
2. Yes, it is hard and difficult to find those sort of evidence would falsify scientific claims, and the process of finding is difficult too.
3. The initial suffering –far from serving as evidence of the validity of the memories- should cast doubt on it.
4. The subjective report of suffering is a possible evidence of sexual abuse, but is not the strongest one. Because it can be influenced by ethical and political beliefs, which play a major role in the present controversy.
5. When a program of research guided by theory x is progressive, x is capable of generating many hypotheses, and x itself is not threatened, althought its surface contours may change. If a prpgram is degenerating , then the core of x is threatened, and the whole program may collapse.
6. While a paradigm holds sway, sicentists are engaged in normal science. When anomalies accumulate or something unexpected is discovered or invented, a revolution may accur. The old paradigm gives way to a new and new ones are added, and its ways of working may be drastically changed by the accessibilit of new tools.
7. No, Kuhn’s thesis imply no relativism. The old one and the challenger B are ofter imcommensurable.
8. I think we can accept it as true in relation to astrology, because it has scientific evidence to prove it. The difference between this and his case is this astrology one can not be so easy to be refuted.
9. In educational area, it should accept the fact that science is embeded in a social context. In history area, it resist the influence of the larger culture.
10. It means that two sets of numbers-the rationals and irrationals cannot be expressed as integral multiples of one unit of measure.
11. Science and religion are incommensurable. Science is objective, and religion is subjective.
12. Naturalistic social science is a social science modeled on the natural sciences.
13. Educational research in the naturalistic mode can rarely tell us that a particular pedagogical method-say, one of teaching multiplication-is significant and generally better than another. And there may or may not be a total displacement of on paradigm by another.
14. The dangers of “going native” is to lose something good in the original culture or paradigm, and the advantage is to absorb those nice things in another culture or paradigm.
15. Social science contributes to a growing feeling within the educational research community, which help us understand why a method works with some people and fails to do so with others.
16. Qualitative research is recommended during earlier phases of research projects, its design emerger as the study unfolods, its data is in the form of words, pictures or objects, which is more “rich”, time consuming, and less able to be generalized. Individuals’ interpretation of events is important,e.g. uses participant observation, in-depth interviews and the like. Researcher is the data gathering instrument, and tends to become subjectively immersed in the subject matter.
17. Those questions are like, how many classes that students are taking can prove the educational improvement, and how many teachers with Ph.D degree in a school and the like.
18. As a policymaker, I might want to know what’s the location of those school, which one of them has what advantages and disadvantages. As a parent, I might want to know how high the educational level those schools have, meaning what’s the quatitative education the schools have.
19. I can think of uses of narrative research, which can be used in educational research and responds that, at least sometimes, we should be so concerned. It is a part of the hermeneutic tradition, invites interpretation and reinterpretation. It puts far more responsibility on the readers or users of research who must play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves.
20. No, we should not. Because it has many faults. First, it ignores the crucial fact that the model has limitations evern in the testing of drugs; a given drug often has differential effects, working as predicted for most patients but failing or even harming some others. Second, education is very different from medicine. Third, insistence on one form of scientific research is short-sighted and sacrifices the significant contributions of other forms. Fourth, insistence on the use of randomized experiments neglects ethical problems that arise as we arbitrarily assign students to one or another “treatment”. Finally, not only is the randomized experiment just one form of scientific research, but scientific research is just one form of educational research.
21. Yes, there is a kind of paradigm clash in the critical thinking movement. Refutation of a particular hypothesis generated by a theory will lead scientists to tinker with the theory, not discard it. Normally, they will revise or adjust peripheral concepts and rules. They will not change the core concepts, which lie in a “Protective belt” of each camp.
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Scientific Culture and Educational Research
What is their position : Their position is the primary emphasis should be on nurturing and reinforcing a scientific culture of educational research, and the development of a scientific culture rests with individual researchers, supported by leadership in their professional associations and a federal educational research agency.
How do they support their point of views: They develop their notion of a scientific culture and its importance in educational research by providing a summary and elaboration of select points within the NRC report.
How do they attact the other side: 1. Picking out some valued topics, analyze them one by one for pointing out the wrong opinions from the other side. 2. They used a lot of reports from NRC. 3. They quoted diversed points of view from different anthors in different fields, but strongly attact the other side.
Educational Research: The Hardest Science of All
What is author’s position : Educational science is unusually hard to do and that the government may not be serious about wanting evidence-based practices in education.
How do they support their point of views: 1. Comparation between two different concept, point of views. Definitions and studies. 2. Use a lots of related examples. 3. Conclued his own opinion based on old study.
How do they attact the other side: 1. By using the data of questionnaire. 2. Start analyzing the other side’s opinions with history of social science and educational research. 3. Use easy to understand example to refuse the other side’s opinion.
Culture, Rigor, and Science in Educational Research
What is their position : Positive educational change is accomplished locally, we need all kinds of research and deliberation, scientific and nonscientific, and practitioner research.
How do they support their point of views: 1. Summaralize both the Feuer, Towne, and Shavelson article and the larger National Research Council report. 2. Analyze their statements and make them clear. Redo definition. 3. Use analogous.
How do they attact the other side: 1. Use some other arguments from other researchers to attact the other side. 2. Quoted some strong point of views from an authorized resource.
Fangqin Li
11/20/07
Chapter 9
1. Because according to Cartesian, in one sense, they take the individual as the very heart of knowledge production, but in another sense, they take the individual as not a real, full-bodied individual with attachments, emotions, and comminity affiliations. In Kantian’s ethic, the individual-as the general mechanism of practical reasoning-became central, but the individual-as actual, embodied person-became irrelevant. The individual as a richly complex, social being was reduced to a reasoning machine. So the paradox is great emphasis on autonomy but a remarkable uniformity prescribed for the products of that autonomy.