Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Inventing the University--Education
"Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse." Understanding this first sentence to Bartholomae's epigram is key in understanding the relationship between success in academic discourse. In order to write academically about a certain subject you have to be educated about it. If you are uneducated in science, for example, and have to write an essay on a subject of science, your essay would not turn out very well. When you are educated in science you know and understand the dialect used in the subject and are then able to write an essay and not only sound like you know what you're talking about, you actually do know what you're talking about. I believe that education is the most important tool in life. Not only will it help you gain access to discourse, it is key in gaining access to anything at all.
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I agree with your assessment regarding education. I thought that it was extremely interesting that he hints that everyone should be able to gain this access, but not everyone is able to through that first quote. I think that he supports this idea by showing us the different examples of the essays, showing us what he considers to be good, yet not quite excellent yet. You can also tell by the examples that some people obviously had a different education as well.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog, mine was very similar. You can't write a good paper without first learning what you're talking about. This was pretty basic stuff. The problem is that what we have to learn will always change as we get older and keep aspiring. We will pretty much always be learning something new.
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