TedxDiliman: Things That Matter

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It had to be a Sunday, and the day of my cousin Nicole’s birthday.  But yes, TED came to Diliman that day.

TedXDiliman: Things That Matter.

My post will delve only on one topic I was fortunate enough to listen to because I was 3 hours, late not only because I decided to have lunch with my birthday cousin but also because my car’s hand break decided to give out.  Before I go on here’s the nifty booklet they gave and it include some description of the event and the topics as well.

 

And so the talk I’m talking about is from Sir Ken Robinsons on Education.  TedXDiliman played the same video below for us at the event:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX78iKhInsc

 

It sounded so familiar because I watched the exact same thing way back, but in an animated drawing by The RSA, which for me was much more exciting, all those drawings!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

 

But I write this because I’d like to connect it with this video on choice (and hopefully someone paid to write journals can write it up nicely if someone hasn’t already done so):

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bqMY82xzWo

 

Watching it and questions arise, such as:

  1. They say nowadays “choices are less and less related to social change”, and so what is educational reform but major social change?  And so how do choices affect this reform?
  2. The overwhelming amount of paths you can take for education, since of course we all can’t take all those courses produce a sense of anxiety, “what do I really want”
  3. Then again this current educational system tends to “in some way pacify people”  and to put them in a “state of indecisiveness when there are too many choices” and only one life to live.  So that throughout their college life they just hum along, trying to complete something they weren’t really fully into anyway.
  4. So in a way you can say, we are all thrown into choosing only one way of defining our life, as working is one helluva big part of it, no thanks to our favourite word: CAPITALISM and the reinforcement that ideology gives to how we perceive life as such.
  5. And so we fall into the question, education is merely in our world a way of entering the workforce? Entering CAPITALISM? Serving the rich who control the system?
  6. And then because of the psychology behind choice education or says career, can we also say that most would choose the middle road of mediocrity only to “appeas[e] the anxiety and guilt in regard to this choice”? I hope not, but maybe it is true? *research please*
  7. Therefore how much does wanting to fit in play a part of our choice in choosing our education?  How much does the ‘Big Other’ influence us as to our career path?  I want to be a lawyer, doctor, engineer, those are indeed the middle path (personally, high path would be a physicist, astronaut, etc.) How much does CAPITALISMs other arms such as Media et al have socially engineering the landscape we are so that we are driven to certain types of education and career paths? How about the zero sum of it all? Ideal courses? Ideal educational paradigm? Do they exist? Or will they disappoint us?
  8. “So when I choose another direction of life, I los[e] the possibility of the other”; and in most cases that’s true – you only have 1 life to live a career, some lucky few get to reinvent themselves.  Then you have to live up to that loss, and for most that is death, not death in the RSA video, but a slow death throughout your life because you wanted something else.
  9. “Now similarly today, we have an ideology … which forces us to perceive ourselves being guilty for the failures in our professional life”
  10. And then let’s tie it back to standardized testing versus a plethora of testing models in an ecosystem of diverse choice of educational paths.
  11. Then the professor talks about the limits of being self-made as an offshoot of the capitalist ideology, and then choice crops up again in relation to this article as to why MY GENERATION thinks we can always make it big and fail to be happy [with our choices][about education].
  12. And then we fall again to being okay to just being me, nobody is special kind of thing, so education can just be normal and standardised anyway. And then it talks about how then we think we are masters when ostensibly we are slaves.
  13. So the point of educational reforms boils down to the economics of operating within CAPITALIST ideology. How much leeway are we given to improve or reform education given that the forces driving education are not at all aligned or mis-aligned or are not even there.
  14. And so there is a submission, a pacification towards education.  We see that education is used more as a tool for capitalism, for politicians, for the rich in control.
  15. And so what is the worth and chances of educational reform as Sir Ken Robinson so eloquently talked about?  Well we always have the Matrix as an inspiration.  Even with complete dominance some movements can indeed ‘one-up’ CAPITALISM, through a back door, through passive osmosis that then permeates the whole system like a undetected virus.  The professor goes on to talk about the absence of movement for social change as related to loss, so scared to lose CAPITALIST valued items which are quantity of material, rather than quality of experiences lived throughout life (just being happy with this or that job, or being happy by going through that stressful life attached to that awesome job, difficult eh?)
  16. She actually ends there and I could end it here, but I just say deep down inside we choose to be happy and so has humanity worked within whatever it had to strive to be happy.  Therefore = whatever makes you happy go do it, take that weird course, or go teach totally awesome, the whole world is a classroom they say.

 

P.S. But we haven’t even talked about how access and entitlement TO choice affects all of this.

 

The end!

 

 

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