1. Common fallacies
2. Education and Expertise 1: Discuss Freire
Required reading / viewing / listening:
Freire, P. "The 'banking' concept of education."
Homework due:
Response paper 4
Freire's description of what he calls the "banking" type of education is what most readers grab hold of when they first read this chapter because it appears familiar; most of us can think of concrete examples where "Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat." But what Freire contrasts to "banking" education - "problem-posing" education - is more difficult to define (which should also be a hint to us that the "banking" concept of education may be a little more complicated, and less familiar, than we think).
In class, we will try to define what Freire means, and test his ideas. As a way to begin organizing your thoughts on this, write a brief page (250 to 400 words) outlining what, concretely, a "problem-posing" class in your major would look like. Be sure to connect the examples you give with specific reference to what Freire says in his essay.
In-class assessment:
Quiz 4
Rewrite the following sentences for concision and clarity:
The author is supporting a very unique policy: a public works administration. The reason why is due to the fact that she grew up during the time of the Great Depression. The policy is designed to put people to work. The policy is supported by several of her friends.
Identify the common methods of introductions
Example 1:
"The system of corporate life," Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote in 1869, is "a new power, for which our language contains no name." "We have no word," he noted in "A Chapter of Erie," "to express government by monopolied corporations." My purpose in this book can be described as an effort to find appropriate words and names for the powers which transformed American life in the three decades following the Civil War. I am less concerned than Adams with effects of "monied corporations" on either government or industry, though some of those consequences, so crucial in the emergence of modern society in America, figure in my account. I am concerned chiefly with effects of the corporate system on culture, on values and outlooks, on the "way of life." And just as my subject encompasses more than politics and economics, so my treatment of the corporate system extends beyond the technical device of incorporation in business enterprise. BY "incorporation" I mean a more general process of change, the reorganization of perceptions as well as of enterprise and institutions. I mean not only the expansion of an industrialist capitalist system across the continent, not only tightening systems of transport and communication, the spread of a market economy into all regions of what Robert Wiebe has called a "distended society," but also, and even predominantly, the remaking of cultural perceptions this process entailed. By "the incorporation of America" I mean, then, the emergence of a changed, more tightly structured society with new hierarchies of control, and also changed conceptions of that society, of America itself.
Trachtenberg, A. (1982). The Incorporation of America: Culture and society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang.
Example 2:
Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. These beliefs are usually expressed in statements such as "I think that...," "chances are ...," "it is unlikely that...," and so forth. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. What determines such beliefs? How do people assess the probability of an uncertain event or the value of an uncertain quantity? This article shows that people rely on a limited number of heuristic principles which reduce the complex tasks of assessing probabilities and predicting values to simpler judgmental operations. In general, these heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors.
Tversky, A., and Kahneman, D. (1974, September 27). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science vol 185, no 4157 (1124-1131). [p. 1124]
Example 3:
When Beethoven left Bonn in 1792, he had with him an album in which his patron, Count Waldstein, had written: "You are going to Vienna in fulfillment of your long frustrated wishes...You will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn." It was, indeed, with Mozart that Beethoven wished to study; he had traveled to Vienna some years earlier and, it seems, impressed Mozart with his playing. But Mozart had recently died, and the twenty-one-year-old Beethoven turned to Haydn, who had already encouraged him during a visit to Bonn.
It would appear as if our modern conception of the great triumvirate had been planned in advance by history. The idea was, in fact, already sanctioned by Beethoven's contemporaries. Years after the death of Haydn, but long before that of Beethoven, when music-lovers complained of the frivolity of Viennese musical life, they compared the infrequent performances of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven with the popularity of the new and more modern Italian opera. Even those who believed that music had stopped with Mozart thought of Beethoven not as a revolutionary but as an eccentric betrayer of a great tradition. The more perceptive placed him quite simply on a level with Haydn and Mozart. As early as 1812, in the writings of the finest contemporary music critic, E. T. A. Hoffman (who loved Mozart so much that he changed one of his names from Friedrich to Amadeus), these were the three great figures, and there was no other to set by their side except Gluck, who stood out for the seriousness and the integrity of his conception of opera. "Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven," Hoffman wrote in 1814, "developed a new art, whose origins first appear in the middle of the eighteenth century. Thoughtlessness and lack of understanding husbanded the acquired treasure badly, and, in the end, counterfeiters tried to give the impression of the real thing with their tinsel, but this was not the fault of these masters in whom the spirit was so nobly manifest."
Rosen, C. (1972). The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York: Norton.
Identify the common methods of concluding:
I have described the path to the fast track that college graduate women have taken starting with Cohort 1, who graduated in the first two decades of the twenthieth century and who had "family or career" to the latest group, Cohort 5, who has achieved a modicum of success in combing career and family. Each generation built on the successes and frustrations of the previous ones. Each stepped into a society and a labor market with loosened constraints and shifting barriers. The road was not only long, but it has also been winding. Some cohorts of college graduate women gained "family," whereas others gained "career." Only recently has a substantial group been able to grasp both at the same time.
Goldin, C. (2004, March). The Long Road to the Fast Track: Career and family. Working Paper. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
