Has CCS got it right?

So i was doing my pwrpoint presentation for this class and i was thinking: has CCS really got the right idea with these kids? it is great that they graduate this place with a high school degree, but what becomes of them afterword? With no viable skills it seems like they are just a burden being passed on. Granted, there are doubtless a few students who have ended up really shining, but for the greater part I'm really wondering what happens to them. So for my project i suggested that CCS collaborate with unions and the trades in order to get graduating students into strong careers and high-paid work. Some of these students might end up supporting their whole families in the future, and the harsh reality is that with the low skills they have, the current job market is holding success far out of their reach. If they turned around a got trade skills as part of their general education, i think we'd see a lot more long-term success on the part of the students. Yes, many do graduate, but what do they graduate into? without some better options, i see a bleak situation.

Watch this!

Azar Nafisi 4 minute video: Is crisis good for America?

collective responsibility

Arendt opens this weeks reading with collective guilt and responsibility. Although I do not come in close contact with gilt while doing service learning at the hospital, I see collective responsibility in affect. At the end of the day the whole hospital is responsible for how patients have been treated and how many survive. No doctor is blamed for what might have gone wrong. That is not the way a hospital gets its reputation, in fact it is through collective responsibility. Even though I am not a doctor or nurse and can not practice directly on patients, while I serve at the hospital I have the responsibility of maintaining all codes of conduct and enforcing our mission. The hospital as a whole is “held responsible for what has been done in its name” (149). It is the community Arendt gives an example of on page 150 and describes that we cannot live without a community. I can leave the hospital community, but without a doubt I will be entering another and exchanging "one kind of responsibility for another" (150). This goes further to prove that we all work together and without our togetherness we would not have the communities that help us thrive.

The ability to think

In this reading, Arendt focuses on the ability to think and how it affects other aspects of life-moral judgments, guilt, responsibility, etc. For my service learning, I have been working in a preschool where "thinking" as defined by Arendt does not necessarily ever take place. Children follow directions and the group (the so called mores and customs) and do not have an internal dialogue to decide how they feel or what they believe. Arendt writes: "Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and fact arouse" (160). So by the children adhering only to their observations and the environment around them, are they in a sense being protected "against reality"? Or, could it be that first children must absorb the environment around them in order to later think and make their own judgements and reveal a reality? Does Arendt's writing on thinking only apply to adults or does it reach out to all people regardless of age and background?