This Tuesday (2/23) I attended the Farwell Distinguished Lecture entitled In Defense of Food; the Omnivore's Solution by Michael Pollan. Pollan spoke about what's wrong with the way we eat and look at food. He described the "American paradox": our unhealthy obsession with health. I thoroughly enjoyed what Pollan had to say, not only because I am taking a nutrition course this semester, but also because of the correlations between food and education that Pollan's words got me thinking about.
Pollan asked the question, "How do we get to this point?" He described how the unspoken judgements and ideology of nutrientism is the root of our problem. Pollan laid out 4 main points of nutrianism. Below I will compare these ideas about what has gone wrong in our understanding of food is quite comparable to the ineffective beliefs that have made education what it is today.
1. The key to understanding any food is understanding the nutrients they contain. Similarily, I think we may focus to much on what schools are made up of (students based on race, SES, etc.) I'm not saying we should completely ignore this - we can't. But what about looking at the bigger picture of what education should be for everyone?
2. We need experts who understand better than us to tell us what to eat and depend solely on them. In education, we depend so much on the research. We base our instructional strategies and the content we teach on the "teacher experts." When people say, "You must have a standardized test score of x to succeed (or at least graduate from high school), why do we so willingly take their word for it and put so much dependence on the numbers?
3. We divide the food world into good and evil nutrients. We focus so much on whatever the "good" nutrients are at the time. We divide teaching ideologies, types of students, and many other aspects of education into good and evil sides. We also follow several trends of the times within our classrooms. I believe it is good for education to work for what the society needs as time changes, but not every aspect of society need be followed and dropped so quickly.
4. The whole point of eating is health. Whereas, in other countries eating is for pleasure, community, identity, etc. I think we may be missing the point of education too. Are we just putting kids through schooling to give them something to do? Conditioning them to be good little American workers? Teaching them that it's just your intelligence measured by a number that will determine the success of your life?
Michael Pollan addressed many other interesting beliefs that we hold about food, that just seem ridiculous when you actually think about it. What about educations has become this way? How did we get to this point?
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Nice analogy! While I did not attend the lecture, I understand what you are saying and I learned a little about what Pollan had to say. It is very interesting to think about education in the way that he thinks about food. Expanding on that idea, point #4 caught my eye in relating to what we discussed in class today (3/3) about liberal arts education and if America is getting away from the liberal arts ideas. Education is meant to be more than just the technical stuff right? Education should appeal to our involvement in health, community, and social aspects of life and not only focus on turning students into machines who know a lot about a little.
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