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Ameneh's picture

Introduction

Submitted by Ameneh on Sat, 09/04/2010 - 10:02pm.

I am sophomore at Bryn Mawr College and an Undeclared Philosophy/Psychology double major and potentially an Education minor. I’m from Pakistan and studied in the British system my whole life. In my opinion, my educational experience was just what it shouldn’t have been - a bombardment of information that we were expected to memorize and reproduce. I think the purpose of education should be to help people identify who they are, who they want to be and then bridge the gap between the two. Education can change lives and that’s what it should aim to do. This is might sound idealistic, but students should have agency in choosing what they want from their education and even how they want to get it.

 
A few years ago I interned at an underprivileged public school in my hometown in Pakistan and taught the kids there. Despite the dearth of resources - and by resources I mean tables and chairs, stationary, books and the like - the kids dreamt big. While I nodded and smiled as they told me they wanted to be doctors, lawyers and engineers it was hard-breaking to know they would most likely never get there. Since then I’ve wanted to do something, anything actually, to make education accessible to as many kids as possible. 
 
One of my major issues with the education system is how it completely disregards the fact that each  student is an individual. We all have different strengths and weaknesses and trying to fit everyone into the same mould (testing ‘aptitude by ‘standardized tests’, for example) just seems wrong. I hope we will be able to redefine education in this class and explore ways of making it achieve it’s goals (that will hopefully transcend feeding the job market).
 

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