Empowering Education: Shor

While reading Shor I made a million connections (not really a million) to, not only the reading that we do, but also to real life examples.

My biggest real life example came to me with in the first page of reading Shor. When I read, "You must arouse children's curiosity and make them think about school. For example, it's very important to begin the school year with a discussion of why we go to school. Why does the government force us to go to school? This would set a questioning tone and show the children that you trust them and that they are intelligent enough, at their own level, to investigate and come up with answers".


This quote is was made me think of how my teachers used to begin the school year in the past. When my teachers used to ask this to the class I just thought that they expected students to say because we want to come to school and learn, but most of the time we all say because we have to. No teacher has ever asked why we have to or who makes us but we all know that we are forced to go to school until we graduate or drop out.

I my first semester here at RIC one of my teachers asked us why we chose to go to college. I always knew that once I graduated high school that college was the next step. So if I knew that from the time I was little why is a teacher asking me? Then I realized that college didn't have to be the next step, in so many people's lives that I know they didn't go to college this year. We are told from our first day of school to graduation day that we should go to college. The link shows what is drilled into us from the start. I think that if more people, not just teachers, question why we are forced to go to school then maybe we would be more willing to learn.



 Piaget said, "The deficiency is the curriculum in schools, which he saw as a one-way transmission of rules and knowledge from teacher to students, stifling their curiosity". This reminds me of how my high school was all curriculum based and if a teacher started to stray from the curriculum was they were in trouble with the principle. I had a history teacher who like to show pictures of what she was teaching and spent more time on one subject than another because of how well she knew the information. I hated the idea that they would tell her that she could no longer do that. I think that if a teacher knows one topic better than another and has a lot of information on that topic they should be able to spend more time on it.