Philosophy of Education, Rice |0

PHILOSOPHY OF
EDUCATION
My personal idea of education

ALETHEA RICE
Boise State University

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A small 4 walled room is filled with little wooden stained tables and plastic blue chairs,
all lined up in a fashion to seem that they are facing the center front of that room. Small innocent
bodies fill the plastic blue chairs. Their minds are filled with wonder, excitement, and fear as
they await for someone to fill that empty space at the front of the room. A person walks up to that
daunting space and turns to face the little pairs of eyes. The person stands tall and confident in a
colorful but professional attire, and along with it a welcoming smile. As the leading country of
the world the United States of America expects its population to attend school at least through
12th grade so the average child has experienced something of sort of story. My hopes would be
that the end of their stories would always be the same for every child; a teacher with a
welcoming smile. Not only do I hope and strive for this story to be the same for every child but
also that all children have a classroom with an enriched environment, everyone across the world
would have an equal opportunity to achieve the success of education, and more hands on
approach and attention to sciences.
Imagine your favorite restaurant, shopping place, or any place you love to be and think
about it. You think about those places because they are the places that pleased your senses the
most: an enriched environment. When I ask a child where they imagine one of their places to be I
want them to say my classroom. An enriched environment is one which awakens the entire
nervous system, one which is stimulating, curiosity feeding, capable of answering many
questions, a setting which is alive with resources, reflective of real life and bursting with energy
(Classroom Environment). I believe the classroom should foster not only a comforting place for
learning but for growing up as well. Children spend most of their young lives in those small 4
walled rooms with a teacher cramming as much information as the curriculum calls for down

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their throats. Then they are sent home with more questions than answers for the day. With how
much time children are stuck in the classroom it should be a place they are happy to be and ready
to give children the tools for success they need.
All students learn differently so I believe that a good teacher would be one who can offer
all the tools for those different learning styles so that every child can achieve equal educational
success. I fell that with the new common core system to many children are being left behind in a
country that states that No child gets left behind (No Child Left), because of the fact that
children learn differently. Not only do we have the few differences in learning styles here in the
USA but there is an even broader spectrum of learning styles across the world due to cultural
differences, and this, I feel, is something that needs to be understood. The three common
learning styles here in the USA are visualauditorykinesthetic (Three Learning Styles), this
alone can be hard to find a way to incorporate all these in an even teaching process but in a
country where we take education for advantage we need to see the tools needed to help teach
underprivileged children both in and outside of our country. With such an array of cultural
differences a teacher needs to have a passion and patience to understand those cultural needs and
how to respect their differences. My hope is to be able to one day teach those underprivileged
children both in our own and in other countries. I have set myself up by slowly learning about
other cultures through mission work and studying cultures such as the Azande and Yanomami
through my anthropology studies which I plan to major in along with elementary education. All
children, no matter where they are, deserve an equal chance at education so they can achieve the
life they dream of.

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Many children do not get the opportunity to succeed in something they love, this is
something I want to change as an educator. With the recent awareness from the 2012 Barack
Obama Friday Facts of how in the USA Women make up just about half of the American
workforce, but hold less than a quarter of the STEM jobs (Maria) my dream is to be able to
incorporate and encourage for hand on studies of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering,
Mathematics), specifically the science. I have always loved science and with Anthropology as
one of my hopeful majors I would love to be able to introduce anthropology (a science) to
children in a way that they will be able to understand culture better among other things like
DNA. But I would like to do this more with a hands on approach and less of a paper approach,
like most of us older generations grew up doing primarily in sciences. I hope to help be a part of
the rise of women striving to be in STEM not only in the USA but around the world.
The younger generations are the future of this country and we are responsible for
educating the future we want to see. To do this teaching need to not be viewed as a job but
instead as a journey. The journey is to help discover how those children learn and love.
Discovering that will help you guide them down a path for a career they will be able to strive in
and help make a difference in our world. I want to provide a classroom with an enriched
environment that will make the classroom a place I want to be as well as the students, establish
an equal opportunity for children across the world to achieve the success of education, and
encourage more women to follow who they dream of being to help raise the percentage of
women in STEM; That is my personal philosophy of education.

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Work Cited
"Classroom Environment." Oklahoma Commission for Teacher Preparation. Oklahoma
University, n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2015
Maria, Cara Santa. "Women In Science." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d.
Web. 25 Jan. 2015.
"No Child Left Behind." U.S. Department of Education. N.p., 2001. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.
"Three Learning Styles." Indiana University- Purdue University Indianapolis. N.p., n.d. Web. 24
Jan. 2015.