Man and Learning

"We must again create the kind of education that creates great human beings" (Cajete, 1994, p. 68).

Our goal as learners is to find our paths, and our goal as educators is to help our students find their paths.

I never will forget my days teaching Freshman College Composition. While my main concern was supposed to be helping these people develop their writing skills, I became far more concerned about the number of students who had no idea what they really wanted out of their education and out of life. The more I probed, the more I found out that students were far more concerned about finding their right path in life than about learning how to write better. When I took the class in a different direction, the students suddenly started writing a whole lot more, and whole lot better. Instead of researching abstract arguments, they started researching themselves. Instead of writing about critical issues around the world, they wrote about themselves. By the time we got to the argumentative paper, they knew what issues inflamed their passions, and they were much more interested in shaping their voices.

Demands for improving the American educational systems increase everyday, and such changes seem to have become critical as students unhealthily express their dissatisfaction with learning and life. In my opinion, incorporating the concepts behind indigenous education will help us address many of the ills in the current system. We can incorporate the focus on developing a healthy human being without choosing between one or two dominant moral systems by recognizing the infinite possibilities for students' pathways. We can also help people develop a sense of themselves and how they fit in the overall picture, instead of just helping them develop a sense of cosine and verbs. When we interweave learning about ourselves with learning about other content, we make much deeper connections and have a far greater sense of the ultimate meaning of it all.