Who Belongs at Stanford? Discussions of a Different Sort of Education

Catalog description

You've finished your first year of university. You have taken the required first year courses, you hope you have explored enough, you are anxious about choosing a major. You know the campus fairly well, you have perhaps made some friends, you have some sort of routine. But you have the nagging feeling that so much of this is simply an illusion. The question then becomes, do you throw your faith, mind, and your body into that illusion (everyone else seems to), or do you risk the chance of missing a step by spending some time in Sophomore College reflecting on the immediate past and the future, with others who have similar questions. You may feel that the generalizations you heard in Year 1 about liberal education seem remote from your life experiences; you may have wished you could have engaged in more in-depth discussions, but that there was not time or interest in approaching the subject matter as you would have wanted to. We are then faced with the very important question: What happens when 'diverse' populations are recruited to places like Stanford, and then asked to constrain or reshape their diversity for the sake of belonging? We will discuss how this small-scale exercise in intellectual exploration can be read as a correlate for how individuals and societies work. What kinds of identities, values, stories count, and which do not? Liberal ideologies and principles may sound nice, but liberalism tends to flounder when presented with practical real-world issues like employment, health care, police brutality, pandemics, environmental degradation, and yes, education. There are two required texts for the course, first, Brazilian educator Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What Freire proposes is a way of teaching and learning that is the antithesis of what he calls the 'banking model of education.' The banking model works this way, schools deposit learning…