Failure In The Education System In A Talk To Teachers By James Baldwin

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Failure in the Education System
The most important concept in the world today is education; the education system however, is failing students. This failure was a problem in the 1960s, and is still something that people face today. It is a problem because education is supposed to teach students how to find their own identities, so they can question the society around them and change the problems they discover. Writer, James Baldwin, addressed this problem in his A Talk to Teachers. He says that the purpose of education is “to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself…To ask questions of the universe, and then to learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.” (Baldwin 198). This may be the theoretical purpose of education, but I don’t believe that is what is taught in schools today, and it wasn’t taught in schools then either. Education is all about standardized tests, and how well a child can memorize the answers to questions. Baldwin ensues the point later on in his speech, that if he was a teacher he would teach his students about what is wrong with society, and how he should learn who he really is so he can go on to change society and make it better. If the education system had just a few teachers …show more content…

Baldwin mentions this when he said, “It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I am the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child” (Baldwin 197). In order for an education system to teach kids anything having to do with their history, right or wrong, the children need to have basic morals and values instilled in them. If the parents provide their kids with this basic building block of life, it won’t matter as much if the education fails them when it comes to finding their own identity, because they will have an understanding of their values and may be able to find their own identity by

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