What is the purpose?
Greetings,
As with the last post, this is a question posed by a classmate, in which I responded to on the message board that our class has set up. I believe posting these Q-and-A sessions on this medium will shed some light on my psyche and might, if this is done properly, show how I have changed since I had begun the Teacher Education Course series.
Classmate B asks:
“Ok so this may seem like a stupid question, but what does it mean to even indoctrinate someone? As far as the class is going, I think there are some good things going on. But the guest speaker today again reiterated in my mind the “so what?” aspect of teaching social studies. Yeah it’s great to see the trend going on with/history of the teaching of the subject, but so what. I feel like this is more of the “TE” stuff. That doesn’t really make sense, but I just feel so overloaded with theory and discussion that I’m just getting antsy to actually DO.”
I am guessing that we need to have some sort of an answer to this “so what” question that comes up all the time. If we can’t answer this question about a social studies history lecture, can we really attempt to answer it once we get in the classroom and start teaching?
I believe it is important to know where we are in the grand scheme of things. By this I mean that history is important to know where we have come from, the trends that are actively working on us, the trends that have existed and seem not to be active anymore. This context affects nearly every choice we make in some way, shape, or form. It is also important because if we know what trends that are working on us now, we can tell what we are going, or at least make predictions.
I suppose that is a brief answer to your question, B, but at least it is a start.
