Facebook Status on Education

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
~ John Lennon

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    Daniel Ballow The K-12 education doesn’t understand life, and doesn’t care if their students understand life.

They can’t as long as theirs no place to explore this statement. A philosophy class.

I think we’ve failed when school becomes about “getting a degree and getting a high paying job.”

17 hours ago · Like

 

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  Daniel Ballow I was apparently smart when I was younger, and people consoled my social isolation with the prospect of them working for me some day.

 

That idea never comforted me, and it still doesn’t.

17 hours ago · Like

 

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  Daniel BallowSchool has become about survival of the individual, rather then the survival of US, as a society, nation, and planet.

  17 hours ago · Like
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  Daniel Ballow Focus on learning and good grades will follow.
  Focus on studying and nigh-perfect grades will follow.

 

The two aren’t the same.
One is about the internalization of knowledge the other is about memorization.
Learning can happen while memorization does not.
Memorization can happen while learning does not.

Ideally, both will be happening.
Not usually the case. It depends on what matters to you.

17 hours ago · Like

 

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  Daniel BallowIf you’re willing to stress yourself with studying for even better grades.

  17 hours ago · Like
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  Daniel BallowI feel I have more important things to worry about.

  17 hours ago · Like
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  Daniel BallowLike the fate of the human race.

  17 hours ago · Like
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  Daniel Ballow All life as we know it.

 

Letter to Dr. Bennett about Philosophical Education

Dr. Tony Bennett,

I strongly believe Philosophy should be offered as a required subject for elementary though high school students. Any basis for asserting otherwise needs some kind of philosophical justification. It’s a self-negating premise. Of course, like any other subject, lessons must be taught according to their level of understanding.

We have both lived in America long enough to know rational/logical thought is not guaranteed. Without rational thought and understanding as the centre of all areas of study, we have adults who can’t apply what they’ve learned, and perpetuating this generational hostility to the educational system as a whole.

We ask students over and over again “what do you want to be when you grow up?” This isn’t very easy to answer. When we ask a child this question, we’re asking what adult job, that they know very little about, captures their childhood imagination the most. When students become older, we begin to realize this question as more frightening implications. You’re asking high school students “What do you want to do with your life?” How can we possible expect students to examine this question without a forum to ask the big questions about life itself?

Remember what voting was to the women’s right movement?

It’s the right that, once acquired, would open the door to all the others. That’s what I feel about critical thought given to students. Once they can open their eyes and think, everything else will just be a mater of time. As long as we don’t have these classes readily available, we’re churning out irrational thinkers by the generation.

I’m not asking for an elective, I’m asking for a new centre, a new connecting point for ALL areas of study. I firmly believe that as long you have the power to make this readily available, and squander it, you would then be complicit in the existential degradation of the people we’re raising.

 

Without philosophy, there is no “free will.”

I hope this letter will open your mind to the choice you’re now faced with.

Indiana can set a new standard for education like you’ve always wanted.

 

The only question you’re left with is:

“Will it, or will it not?”

 

Thank you.

 

-Daniel Ballow

(I am a student of Ball State University majoring in English Education minoring in Philosophy.

I Graduated from Key Learning Community class of 2010)

What Came First?

 

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Neither. The process of laying eggs evolved from cellular division.

 

Anywho… lets apply my conclusion about “The Chicken and the Egg” to the “The Culture and the People.”

 

What came first, the culture or the person?

At once, people behaved in a way that was most advantageous for a certain circumstance, that “method” self-replicated when the group expanded, and remained and developed independently of the external circumstance.

Ideas, concepts, and systems, and processes are platonic, symbiotic life forms that use people to replicate.

When a species of “culture” evolves, it will condition the people within its sphere of influence for its own self-replication and expansion, but a culture can be killed, a culture can die…

 

…And most importantly, a culture can be an evolutionary dead end that will relentlessly drag the people into extinction with it.

 

That’s why the truth, rationality, communication, and education are so important to our survival…

Teaching Portfolio

http://djballow.iweb.bsu.edu/portfolio/index.html