February 9, 2017 - 23:00
This is my second post of the night to make up for missing class on Wednesday because I'm sick (again >:o )
I've been thinking about the classes I'm taking this semester and, as I was thinking about how much I'm enjoying them all, I realized that all four of them are lining up very well with each other. In my Philosophy class, we talk all about enlightenment and how to free ourselves and enter "nirvana" or any other similar englightened states. It's made me think about the relationship between being "enlightened," and being literate. The more I've thought of this, the more I think the two are very closely tied to each other. A large aspect of enlightenment is to be connected to everything, or in other words, be able to see the relativity of every single thing. And so, to be enlightened would be to be universally literate, to be able to recognize, understand, and connect with everything. I don't know if I'm explaining this very well, I've found that it's very difficult to fully describe, or even comprehend, philosophical ideas.
In my other English class, the first piece we read in the semester was on ideology, more specifically the explanations and ideas of Marx, Althusser, and Jameson on ideology. By building off of each other's arguments throughout history, we've come to an understanding that everything runs on ideas, but ideology completely structures socieities. Specifically, the ideology of the dominant culture structures society. Society values the values and beliefs of the dominant culture, and label those who do not fall under the same ideology as "other." And when we bring the subject to education, we must analyze the ideology of education systems. As with our education system, we are taught to believe that education of a very specific type will lead to success. And so, through deductive reasoning, we see how the ideology of our dominant culture shapes literacy in our society and how different groups of people are affected by the ideological state apparatus of our education system.