reading journal

The Educated Student: Global Citizen or Global Consumer
By: Benjamin Barber

Summary: When the United States of America’s government, centered around a democratic setting, was first envisioned in 1776 it focused on active citizenship by its constituents. Jefferson and many of the other founding fathers pushed for education of young men so that they may pilot the future of the nations government with intelligence. Education has long been associated with the ability and the power of voting. When the African Americans and Women were given the right the vote it was always precluded by the desire to intelligently study and influence one’s own government.
Over time however through the emergence of major corporations, the goal of education has been thrown off its axis. The idea that any one religious or political body may claim rights over education is met with a firm protest, however corporations and their advertisements gain easy access to the education market place. Schools seeking out ways of introducing technology that is unaffordable given present budget spending practices have begun seeking out these companies in what has become a practice of willful exploitation of the education system in America. Company will lease out the use of these technologies if only for the chance to expose young people to their own campaign gimmicks. These same companies are humbly aware of the fact that if they can get a child to use their products at an early age they will be hooked for life. Corporate America is slowly building a monopoly on the education system. Even the Internet, which was originally viewed as the frontier of information exchange, has been played as the staging ground for corporate ad wars. Children are learning more and more about their world through the eyes of these corporations; they are left unaware of alternative ideas. Even Universities look to companies to fund research, to in the end have the fruit of their labor snatched up by the companies to be horded for a profit. Education should be about educated one about public policies and to empower the individual with the knowledge to understand the workings of politics. Corporations offer a one sided view of such understandings which hurts the individual and society.
September 11 was a chance at an awakening for the people of America. It was a call for people to actively think for themselves. That morning it was the civil servant like the police and firemen that came to peoples rescue. It opened people eyes to the happenings of war, hunger, and poverty around the world. These things were once a distance idea but now it had breached the borders and was in people’s faces. This was something that prior ad campaigns never brought to light. The current trend toward globalization and its unifying factors has lead people to acknowledge a need for knowledgeable interdependent citizens of the world.
It is a call for educators and the educated alike to pursue independent facets of learning so that they may learn more than what is in the classroom. The author wants people to gain their own curiosity about current affairs. This hope runs parallel with the need for public action on the part of the public.

Response:
This article main audience was college students like myself. The call to knowledge and interdependence in this essay is very inspiring. I think it is why we read things like these essays, to help us understand other perspective of the life on this planet and anticipate and solve problems. I personally think I am a very informed individual as far as public awareness policy making goes. Once last year when I was watching the evening new my friends commented with a question of “why do you watch that? You’re like an old person.” I realized the great divide in public understanding then. The only people I know that are interested in politics and journalism majors, nobody else seems to care because they fail to see the link between things like public patenting policy and molecular genetics.
I think that we can all benefit more over if only more interest was paid to the policy making process in this country. So many people feel powerless in the fight against laws that directly affect them, mostly based on their lack of knowledge to actively influence their government, which after all is the right and obligation of a citizen. The less knowledgeable a pubic is about the happenings of its own government make it more susceptible to those who seek to exploit such a body. Educated and freethinking people are the vanguard of democracy in this country, and it is the right and obligation of every citizen to fulfill the democratic duty in that regard.