TedxUTSC Critique - Essay Example

Its not the singing that makes the approach controversial and engaging but the lyrics of the music which goes “We don't need no education/ We don’t need no thought control/ No dark sarcasm in the classroom/ Teachers leave them kids alone/ Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!” (Waters, 1979). Taken literally, its a university professor dismissing the very institution he works for. Of course we do not take it literally because we know that this not an uninformed antics but rather a way to illustrate the point which I believe, if only the academe would take seriously would be an effective learning approach.

It is refreshing to see that an academic acknowledges that indeed there is a need to improve our educational system. This is not merely an opinionated suggestion but in fact grounded on present reality. In a study made by The Education Digest, it revealed that America’s education system is deteriorating . Just when we thought that we are still leading in the world in terms of the quality of education, we are in fact in the middle (2010). In a document prepared by The Presidnet’s Council of Advisors on Science Technology it reported that quality education matters because the human resource of a given country will determine if it can solve the “immense challenges in such areas such as energy, health, environmental portection and national security (2010 pg. 42). The document also reported that the future economy will be more technology based and this meant a heavy emphasis in hard subjects such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and that the way that America is teaching its student not aligned to this direction.

The guitar in the video “What My Guitar Taught Me About Improving Education” is actually just a demonstration how education should be in the modern world. That to be able to engage ourselves in whatever subjects that we are trying to learn, we have to find meaning why we are doing it and not just merely getting the mark and passing the subject. In the video, it showed how the speaker was able to learn the many ways on how an electric guitar produce a sound by building the guitar himself. He also elaborated the idea in a classroom setting that instead of administering tests, essays or reports, he would instead ask his students to find an undeveloped Wikipedia page and complete it ourselves.

I could relate with the excitement of his students because our work is actually out there in the real world where people can really use. This kind of teaching inadvertently pushes us to research more, write better, not because we wanted to get good grades but because we would like our work to be good and grade will just be a coincidence. The professor’s exposition is grounded on reality and as a student I could relate to it. Many of us students are sometimes wondering if some of the schoolwork could be use in the real world that we sometimes the syllabus is deliberately making the subjects difficult just for the sake of making it academically rigorous even without anticipated benefit in the real world.

This is supported by the other video about “Dreaming on Purpose” that talked about cognitive dissonance (Jesse D’Andrade nd) where solutions to certain problems are not a result of linear rationalization but are rather dissonant. I mentioned this because I think our