Redefining Education as a 'Challenge'

When I wrote my first assignment about education at the beginning of the year, I chose to define education by calling it a life-long mission because it was unavoidable and every human experiences some form of education. I never realized how vague that definition was until now – there are so many more aspects to education than what can be seen on the surface. Throughout the year we have looked into so many details that we cannot just say that it’s a life-long mission. It is more like a challenge that demands to be met with an argument and a confrontation.

This is reflected throughout all our assignments and our ongoing research projects. We continuously search for an “ongoing conversation” about education so that we can familiarize ourselves with the topic of education. This could be referred to as the stage where we are searching for the challenge. An example of this is our in-class readings, such as “Living Savage Inequalities”, where we read the article hoping to find something that will spark a conversation, or a ‘challenge’. Most of us were struck by the low quality of the inner-city schools of Chicago and the empowerment these students had to make a change in their schooling conditions. Once we have found a conversation-starter, the ‘confrontation’ between yourself and the article begins. We will never agree with everything we read, so it’s only natural to express our thoughts on something, whether negative or positive. Some of us acted negatively against the fact that the Board of Education lets this happen in schools. We develop an ‘argument’ that expresses our thoughts on paper and, by doing this, we have continued the cycle of an ongoing conversation. We have met the challenge eye-to-eye, and ‘fought’ to succeed. What marks our success is if the argument you posed created conversations from other individuals –such as feedback from our research papers – this is when you know you have succeeded!

Education could be redefined as a ‘personal challenge’ to your mind. Whatever way an individual chooses to face the challenge is up to that individual, and no individual ‘fights’ the challenge in the same way. A challenge allows for many detailed ways to ‘attack’ education. Using what I’ve said, one could research how it benefits someone to challenge/argue the normal way of thinking in education to personally enhance an individual’s way of thinking. Finding out how this works would largely benefit the field of educational studies.