Critical thinking is often the main goal of education rather than the simple accrual of knowledge. This is thematically discussed in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Lesson and David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Speech, Kenyon College. Bambara’s story shows an adult leading a group of children in an out-of-town educational trip. Wallace’s speech, on the other hand details the transition of graduates into adult life and of how their college education plays a role in it. Whereas Bambara’s story deals more on the racial themes and differences of inequality, Wallace’s speech focuses on the larger whole while focusing more on the themes of adulthood. This paper seeks to discuss three main topics: 1.) Awareness; 2.) Education vis-à-vis Learning; and 3.) Innocence vis-à-vis Ignorance.
Awareness is closely linked to critical thinking and the individual’s ability to perceive his environment in various ways. Wallace focuses on this by describing the mundane and petty frustrations of a repetitive and adult life. Wallace (320) correlates education with awareness and states: “It is about the value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness”. Arrogance in thinking that the world and everything in it revolves around the individual hinders self-awareness and critical thinking. Bambara and Wallace both talk about awareness by showing its target audience a world that is different from their own. In Wallace’s case, he describes in detail the banality and mundane activities of an adult life which the graduates will have to transition into soon after. Bambara, on the other hand shows the differences in the dichotomy of the economic and racial profiles of the children and the town they visited. Awareness then deals with having to see things in a different light by first thinking and reflecting about one’s own conditions. The big difference in how Bambara and Wallace deals with this can be seen in how the former talks about the larger issues of race and equality. Wallace, on the other hand simply disregards this issues as he deems this unnecessary and unimportant to the larger whole. Wallace considers and reaches out to the importance of awareness in dealing with one’s own self and other people regardless of such ideologies. Another difference can be seen in the way the main narrators or educators of the story teach this awareness to its target audience. Wallace explicitly states this whereas Miss Moore simply asks questions and waits for the children to realize the importance of these differences. Nonetheless, both of them showed that an education must be adjusted to accommodate real learning.
Education is often said as being inefficient in preparing its students for the real world. Whereas the educational system has focused on a system of merits, achievements, and grades, it has occasionally failed to instill learning in a sense of adjustment of this knowledge for societal use. “Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded” (Wallace 316). This certainty, which Wallace describes as being an individual’s default setting, is also due in part of the discrepancies of education and learning. Education is defined here is being the most base accrual of knowledge without any form of learning. In a sense, this means the regurgitation of what the books and professors all say without thinking of how this all correlates to the world as a whole.
Educated people then can still be deemed ignorant whereas children who are yet to experience the majority of what society has to offer can be considered innocent. This kind of description oversimplifies innocence and ignorance in the field of education. Innocence can simply mean to be inexperience with certain ideals. For example, the children in Bambara’s story fail to comprehend the extravagance of some people when it comes to entertainment. “Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out” (Bambara 100). Ignorance then can be regarded as the lack of knowledge despite an awareness of its existence. Again, this descriptions oversimplify the matter as the two can be used interchangeably considering that no individual can be all-knowing. What is important to note here is how these two were used in both stories. Wallace uses the reality of mundane, repetitive activities to show the ignorance of people when it comes to how important it is to think about a change in perspective affects everything. Bambara, on the other hand, uses children to show the transition of innocence into ignorance. While one child questioned the things she saw in town, the other children refused to think about its importance. Education works in the same way in that people fail to comprehend or rather think about the importance of such knowledge. Rather than a conscious choice of what is important and not, people are lulled into the default setting of automatic perception.
Wallace and Bambara were both able to show the importance of using education as a means to foster critical thinking in a real-world experience. Whereas Wallace relates this to an adult world setting, Bambara uses themes of economic, racial, and social importance. While there are differences in the execution of their views in education, they were both able to describe the difference of learning in a classroom as opposed to experiencing it firsthand. By viewing things differently through awareness, individuals are able to use their education to accommodate learning and to learn of their ignorance of the importance of it in society.
Works Cited
Bambara, Toni Cade. “The Lesson.” Literature: The Human Experience. Eds. Richard Abcarian, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. 11th edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. Print. 96-101.
Wallace, David Foster. “Commencement Speech, Kenyon College.” Literature: The Human Experience. Eds. Richard Abcarian, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. 11th edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. Print. 315-20.
