Theme of Zoom Meeting: Education
©2021 by Richard E. Gordon Last updated: April 21,
2022
email:
rgordon118@tampabay.rr.com
For several questions, I have provided underlined links that will take you to related online information. Try coming up with your own thoughts first – then investigate the links or ignore them – whatever you wish.
If the links don’t work with just clicking your mouse arrow, hold down your Ctrl key as you click. Any problems with a link please let me know: rgordon118@tampabay.rr.com
Before our meeting, perhaps take the time to check off the questions and quotations you would like to comment on. I’ve deliberately included far more questions and quotations than we can cover in our meeting time. Our conversation can just focus on those items you select.
1. If you could have changed one thing about your formal education, what would it have been?
2. What would you say were the outstanding characteristics of your favorite teacher?
3. What disadvantages, if any, do you see in sending a child to a non-religious private school? A sectarian private school?
4. What role should parents -- and grandparents, too -- play in the education of their children/grandchildren?
5. If your high-school senior grandchild asked your advice on becoming a teacher, what would be your reply?
6. Why would you (not) support the idea of giving higher salaries to teachers working in a poor, disadvantage, and crime ravaged neighborhood?
7. What may make a teacher's job much more difficult today than it was when you were in school?
8. How has the Internet impacted education? Would our schools be better off if the Internet had remained in the imagination?
9. What, if anything, should our schools teach students about believing what they read on the Internet? How would you go about such Internet instruction?
10. How did a someone -- not a teacher -- have a great, positive influence on your education, perhaps even after you were no longer going to school?
11. Should American children be entitled to a free education at a public, state college even if they come from wealthy parents?
12. Can you name present-day highly successful people who never graduated from college?
13. What would be your reaction if your children or grandchildren were being taught by an obviously gay or transgender male or female?
14. Would you rather belong to a social or a religious organization where most of its members were college graduates? non-college graduates? about an equal mixture of both?
15. Do you think that most college graduates look down on those who dropped out of school? What would you say to these "look down their noses" college graduates -- otherwise known as condescending degree wavers?
16. Without naming names, can you think of a mom and dad, although not college grads themselves, who raised a child in such a pro-education environment that the child crowned her education earning a doctorate degree in science? What did these loving parents prove about nourishing a child’s love of education?
17. What course do you think every college student should be required to take? Why do you view such a course essential?
18. Imagine what obstacles a high school teacher might educating youngsters about racism? sexism? tolerance? propaganda? standing up for the disadvantaged?
7. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” -- William Butler Yeats
8. “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” --Sydney J. Harris
9. “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. -- Robert Frost”
10. Nine tenths of education is encouragement.--Anatole France
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ―
12. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” ―