Looking back on my time within the Public Achievement program at DU, I find myself both hesitant to bring my thoughts to a close, and excited to apply what I have learned to my future ventures. PA provided me a dramatic introduction to working with high school students, dealing with issues of cultural competency, and working with a small team of individuals over a long period of time. Considering my desire to study abroad and volunteer or work in the education field, all those experiences will prove invaluable in the future. But on a more fundamental level, PA has provided me with a more basic experience that I have not explicitly had before, that of working in a moral and public philosophical context.
In academia, beyond issues of academic honesty, rarely are students pushed to think about the ethical considerations of their actions and activities and about the questions of how they should engage others in interaction. Our treatment of our peers is understood in terms of getting along or achieving academic goals, rather than in terms of uplifting or empowering them in order to make the world a better place. In fact, education and college are typically set forward to students as self-serving ventures for which the ultimate goal is a better life for you, the participant and the student. While on a certain level I appreciate being treated as an individual and being regarded by the merits of my own work--after all, group projects in classes drive me nuts!!!--I think that such an individualistic focus has troubling implications, leaving us unprepared to deal and interact with others at best, and at worst belittling and disparaging the contributions of others in life. Morality ultimately is a question of how one should act towards and around others, whether the impetus of that "should" is utilitarian, divine, or logical. But unfortunately moral questions are dealt with tangentially in education if at all, leaving their exploration to church, home, and the extreme cases, the law. Simultaneously, questions of meaning, purpose, reality, existence, and knowledge are treated in secondary detail to questions of grammar and addition.
I suppose I should feel fortunate that no one has ever told me how I should live my life, but by having the absence of such instruction or at the very least exposure to such questions beyond the rare English or Philosophy class, we as a society are encouraging our youth to avoid those questions, not challenge the status quo, and accept the traditional patterns of life. And if they reject that, we are encouraging them to rebellion, rather than engagement with their peers and elders to construct a new vision of how the world should be.
Public Achievement provides an opportunity for high school and middle school students to engage in questions of how the world should be, which leads both them and the coaches to question how they should act, considering that our social world is constructed by our combined actions.
I suppose I should feel fortunate that no one has ever told me how I should live my life, but by having the absence of such instruction or at the very least exposure to such questions beyond the rare English or Philosophy class, we as a society are encouraging our youth to avoid those questions, not challenge the status quo, and accept the traditional patterns of life. And if they reject that, we are encouraging them to rebellion, rather than engagement with their peers and elders to construct a new vision of how the world should be.
Public Achievement provides an opportunity for high school and middle school students to engage in questions of how the world should be, which leads both them and the coaches to question how they should act, considering that our social world is constructed by our combined actions.
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