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The short passage used from the story “My Place” is written by Sally Morgan. Sally uses different conventions in the passage to position the reader to respond to her story. The conventions used are conflict, point of view and plot.

The conflict of self vs. self and self vs. others is used to position the reader into responding to the passage. The conflict of deciding to stay or leave the car, self vs. self, gets the reader to understand how doing so could lead to some dangers and that that character is accepting to face it. If they kid’s in (more…)

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines freedom as personal liberty, independence and power of self-determination. Although we may not associate these qualities with education traditionally, upon closer inspection it is not at all difficult to directly link the three. As people grow older and wiser with age they do so also with education. To learn and to be educated is to challenge oneself and to become more engaged in the world around you, and in your place in it.

Education at its best inspires and encourages, empowers and unites. It continues to be arguably the most important institution in our society and our most valuable tool. Through education people are able to gain a better understanding of their lives as well as of others’, and how to improve them. Education gives us the power and control to fulfill our dreams and create our destiny. As is evident through both bell hooks’ and Shauna Singh-Baldwin’s writings, people’s experiences with education and learning obviously differ accordingly, factoring in specifics like gender and race. These factors clearly define our personal boundaries and barriers, both restricting and capacitating our intellectual progress. With the help of hooks and Singh-Baldwin this paper attempts to examine the experience of how education as freedom is achieved under the influences of race and gender.

Gender has always been and continues to be a subject, which dramatically effects both sexes in their daily lives. Both men and women have their obligatory gender stereotypes. Women are seen as passive, gentle, emotional creatures while men are the more intellectual, strong, aggressors. Because of the stigma of these stereotypes both genders have had to endure their share of social turmoil. Women however, having historically been identified as the weaker, more vulnerable, less independent gender have also had to struggle with inequality and the barriers, which it creates. Hooks gives us an example of this when she writes: In the apartheid South, black girls from working-class backgrounds had three career choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could become school teachers. And since, according to the sexist thinking of the time, men didn’t really desire “smart” women it was assumed that signs of intelligence sealed one’s fate. From grade school on, I was destined to become a teacher.

Women from the South had to adhere to certain social expectations, which involved succumbing to gender stereotypes. In her essay hooks describes how she too was tempted to give in to social pressures and follow her role as an intellectual black woman, which was to become a school teacher. Although hooks became a teacher she never gave up her dreams of becoming a writer and as she learned more through her own education she became more confident that writing was what she should be doing. “Writing would be the serious work,” and hooks both teaches and writes in her career. The role of gender in hooks’ life served as a reminder of the limited choices of women in the South, but at the same time seemed to provide her with a drive to defy the norm and reach for her dreams thereby achieving independence from (more…)

Life is tough. When we think of our lives, we tend to focus on a broad scale: the years, or decades, that we have been on Earth. Yet, our lives are actually lived one short moment at a time. Every moment is a drop of water, that we make a choice with, and over time, alter the course of our lives. For most people, those tiny decisions they make are not based on rules, laws, commandments, or high philosophy, but by evaluating the situation and applying their morals. Throughout a life, morals may change. Life is fluid, our understanding may widen over time like an old river, and slow down to bend and accommodate to the opinions and values of others that we meet in the course of our lives.

Humans are intelligent beings with self-consciousness, and therefore simply living and surviving is not enough; we require a goal in life. All people, whether great philosophers, priests, farmers or prisoners, have their own interpretation of life, its goals, and how to make the most of it all. Through the ages, the philosophies of people are shared, and shaped to fit the times, the society and the individual’s personality. In my life, I have been able to live in a complex time in history in radically different societies, and through these experiences, I have been able to shape my own individual philosophy.

Different philosophers have different ideas of how a person should be moral, and what should be their goal in life. Hobbes said that we all are in the state of nature and we need to be under a social contract, under an absolute monarch system. Mill’s Utilitarian theory defines morality in terms of maximization of utility for all parties affected by a decision or action; summarized by the principle: “The greatest good for greatest number of people.” However, unlike Mill where the act of morality depends on the consequences Kant believes whether or not a person acted morally depends on whether he or she had acted on reason alone. Kant sees will as fully autonomous and therefore he believes it requires no external motivation. MacIntyre proposed that all these Enlightenment thinkers were systematically destroying morality, leaving it in fragments. According to MacIntyre, the theories set forth on the basis of human nature failed because all of them rejected any ability for reason to determine or discover a unitary human end.

Through this extremely brief summary of the philosophical theories presented, we are able to see that many of these philosophical theories have been created with a sense of egoism that time has exposed as slightly limited in their viewpoint. Though these philosophies may have seemed right for the time and culture that they were formed in, they have not stood up to the fluid nature of the ages. Calling on ethical principles of these philosophers doesn’t always lend clarity to solving a problem. For example: one person may argue that the consequences matter most (utilitarianism) while another can refute that by saying that those are chance, and intentions are more important (Kant). Through this over-simplified example, we can see that a single philosophical viewpoint may be too narrow to provide an answer.

Imagine, if upon leaving an ethics class, every student suddenly knew how to figure out all the right answers to ethical problems; if they wanted to know (more…)

The Great Depression toke place from 1930 to 1939, it was a period where America saw grinding poverty and fabulous wealth side by side. The members of this nation were questioning if democracy could survive, and felt that a revolution may have occurred if President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not elected. The severe depression caused the people to come together and be responsible for their own destiny to make the nation work for them, through this they found that when the Great Depression had finally ended, they had made a new America.

The film, titled “A Job at Ford’s”, gave us a detailed look at the struggle placed on many workers in Detroit, who were employed by the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford was responsible for revolutionizing the assembly line in 1914, and mass-producing his line of automobiles, the Model-T. With this innovation came many job openings and Ford Plants were employing tens of thousands in the Detroit area alone. After the ‘roaring 20’s’ (more…)