Freedom Of The Mind

3 Pages 778 Words

Freedom of the Mind

Fredrick Douglass was born into slavery, but died as a free man. He explains education as “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Education has not only become means of learning to read and write. In today’s society, ignorance seems to enslave people in terms of perceiving reality. A child is born into the world with no means of differentiating perspectives of his or her society. Education today is the pathway to freedom psychologically, by learning to accommodate schemas, detect conservation, and avoid geocentricism.
As soon as you come out of your mother’s womb, you start to develop schemas of your surroundings. Schemas are the way in which we organize information that we have received. As a parent, there are certain things you must know how to do in order to teach your child how to accommodate these schemas, or the child may never learn how to accommodate new ideas. For example, a baby sitting in his high chair will drop his orange juice more than 100 times. If a parent scolds their child for doing this, the parent is not allowing the child to experience the reality of their first schema. As the child continuously drops his orange juice, he is developing the concept that objects fall when dropped, creating his own sense of science. This becomes very important when the child sees a balloon for the first time. The child now has to accommodate his new schema that not only do objects fall, but they go up as well. Being able to differentiate between these two schemas develops the child’s understanding of the world in terms of reality. He is now able to see that there are different ways in which things happen, not only with objects, but in his everyday life. The child creates freedom for itself to better understand reality.
After accommodating schemas has been mastered, the child needs to learn the concept of conservation. In which he learns that things can be the same, even when changed slightly. For ...