Emerson's Education

Anonymous
10 – 23 – 13
Humanities – 5
Emerson's Education: Assertion & Claims  
Assertion & Claims
I feel that Emerson’s claim is that teachers believe they can successfully teach an entire class of a great size, in some cases up to thirty students, by just introducing and lecturing on a subject expeditiously. This method may work for easier components of a subject, or subjects that the students have already had prior instruction on, but in nearly all cases one of the students is going to be left in the dust at the end of the lecture and will have no clue what is going on. To quote Emerson, the teacher should “see what they need, and that the right thing is done” in order to get every student to understand the material, but in a way that is interesting to the students and not mundane (107). Ideally, a classroom environment will consist of students and teachers learning in unison about a subject, each student educating his fellow classmates about something he knows well and could teach to the entire classroom in a way that all will be able to remember.
The way our school system is run, Emerson’s view of a flawless classroom environment that includes all of the students and teachers working together is difficult to see. Our current No Child Left Behind policy (from what I have made of it, at least) will have a teacher teach basic material to his students until he can assess their knowledge and ensure that they all know what they will need to know to pass the standardized TAKS tests. Only the classes with the most advanced of teachers and students will be able to be run in the aforementioned “Emersonian” manner, which is known to LCHS students as Learning through Discussion. My World History AP teacher had a brilliant approach to this system; he would lead the discussion and ensure that the material would connect and flow, (chronologically because it was history) but nearly every single fact and comparison was generated by the students. When a shy...