Essay #6: Teachers, students, and the responsibility of educating and getting an education

30 minutes

Students are more responsible for their education that their teachers.

There are students of all ages.  Adult students certainly have a responsibility to educate themselves.  However, students in grades 1 – 12 are minors.  As minors, they do not have the same responsibilities as adults, indeed, when children enter kindergarten, they are not expected to be responsible for too many things, much less their education.

Teachers, on the other hand, are paid to educate.  They follow a curriculum, policy, and procedures set by the state, or by private institutions, and their goal is to facilitate learning.  They cannot force students to learn, but it is the expectation that teachers use techniques to present information that enable the students to understand and learn.

Taxpayers and parents paying tuition are paying learning institutions to provide an education.  Just as we pay for services such as law enforcement, health services, or infrastructure work, and we expect the staff involved in those areas to bear responsibilities, we pay for teachers in schools and expect them to carry out a job.

A class of 4-yr-olds is not expected to sit and learn material all day, but students who are older are asked to work much harder at school.  Children don’t usually get to decide the school they will attend, or the teachers they have, however, they can understand the general concept of education and they understand that society places a value on getting an education, even if they personally do not share that value.  It is the responsibility of parents to prepare their children to be successful adults and one of the 

Essay #5: Understanding a culture through its "foodways"

Studying foodways – what foods people eat and how they produce, acquire, prepare, and consume them – is the best way to gain deep understanding of a culture.

Researching the culture of a people involves learning as much as possible about that people.  Food procurement, preparation, and consumption would be important topics to examine, but a focus on food is not the best way to gain insight into a culture.

When anthropologists make a study of a culture they examine the behavior of the people in that culture and they study items such as beliefs, customs, relationships, economy, politics, and art.  By examining these at length, anthropologists can begin to comprehend the culture, but it is debatable how much study is needed for a “deep understanding” of that culture, or if true understanding of another culture is even possible. Franz Boaz, a pioneer of modern anthropology, introduced cultural relativism: the idea that people observing another culture will always see it through the lens of their own culture, and will judge it based on the norms with which they are familiar.  To overcome this bias, anthropologists sometimes live and interact with the people of a culture over an extended period of time.  Participation in obtaining, preparing and eating food helps to understand the culture, but it would only make up a part of all the behavioral patterns of the culture.

An anthropologist would have difficulty using food practices as a basis to understanding a culture because two distinct societies living in the same geographical area might have similar food because of the plants and animals that are available.  Furthermore, circumstances such as drought, blight, or many environmental factors might alter the availability of certain foods during the period of time that the anthropologist is living in the culture. Compared to food availability, it is less likely that the language, social customs, and relationships will vary in the short term.  That is why it would invaluable to study all aspects of the culture in depth.

The culture of a people is made up of a large number of behaviors.  All of these must be observed and sometimes participated in to understand a culture.  Anthropologists would use the study of food procurement, preparation, and consumption to gain insight into a culture, but would give equal or greater importance to items such as language, customs, and societal roles.