Minutes from Flight School: Education's Foundations

• What is Education?
• Why is it important?
• Why do we have to pay so much for it at universities?
• How can we change the way public education is administered in New York city?
• How do we take ownership and translate it into change?

ENGAGE!

Discussion on Affirmative Action - Golden

• Doesn’t promote that much social equality, but whose job is it to promote equality?
• The difference that Affirmative Action makes – the type of people who benefit may have been successful anyway
• 
  

  "Is it just a bandage for inequality? Doesn’t really address the real discrepancies"

Claiming an Education - Rich

• Female perspective is left out
• Women have to claim their education rather than receive it, not be passive receptors of it.
• Are those in power in an all women’s institution really women or just emulating men?
• All women’s environment: most conducive for growth if separated?
• 
  

  "Don’t integrate into a burning building"

• 
  

  "Can’t people be united under one cause, why the need for separation?(all women school, all black college, etc.)"
  

• 
  

  "But can’t groups seek to improve their own community/ people?"

• Separation denies people from really experiencing, and it makes you weaker when you had
• You can segregate based on ideas not just physical characteristics. i.e. Having a community of free thinkers

Banking Concept of Education - Freire

• Students = containers, receptacles filled by teacher. Intake and spit back education
• A lot of negative stimuli so if you give kids all this choice, many will chose the wrong shit
• Home school – give kids the opportunity. After a while kids get bored, are curious, want to explore and want to learn
• We under-estimate children
• Will free thinkers lead to the best outcomes?
• What is the overall goal of this free-thinking education?
• We are taught to memorize, what is a good student?
• Conforming and not conforming
• Just because you’re a good student doesn’t mean you’re a fucking receptacle
• 
  

  "Biggest disappointment is when we don’t equip students to live in the immediate world outside of the school."

• Educational foundation was to make workers, only in college do you have the freedom to really think – and most people don’t go to college.
  

  Shit, most people in college don’t really think."

On the Reproduction of the Relations of Productions - Althusser

• How did education become a tool to exploit people? Some say the church?
• School should be transformative but it keeps you at a place: its’ an institution and promotes some type of ideology.
• We can raise the bottom and things have gotten better.
• Our school system is based on a city and is based on efficiency. You would have to completely subvert society to change its ideology of schools
• Repressive (function through violence, public: government, prison) state VS Ideological (private: family, education, church) state apparatus
• People attack repressive apparatus more cuz it is more tangible
• Do we need more money? Not necessarily, shouldn’t need money to motivate people
• 
  

  "Aren’t we sacrificing for others so that they can live comfortably? If so can’t we demand some of the same comfort for ourselves"

• Money for better grades/ schools giving more money for better grades, paying teachers more for students better grades, / but don’t people go to school to get more money?

Next Flight School 4/20 3pm
Topic:

• Alternatives to our education system?
• Liberation theology, how do we take control of our education?
• True education through dialogue, dialogue that creates change/ practice
• Charter schools, home-schooling, black nationalism, freedom schools, alternative schools, community control

Network:

• Bring more people to flight school
• Those not in college, or wouldn’t know about this info
• can’t impose opinions on people, just let ‘em know
• Then “Let Truth and Falsehood Grapple”