My Childhood, American Education and System

October 01, 2021

My Childhood, American Education and System

Sandia Elementary School, 1983-1984, Kindergarten, Clovis, New Mexico

Meryl Viola Bravo (First Person from the Left, First Front Row)

Sandia Elementary School, 1984-1985, First Grade, Clovis, New Mexico

Meryl Viola Bravo (2nd Person from the Left, First Front Row)

I was a child who knew the concept of system; and yet, understood the natural grace of system. The system of reproduction between mother and father produces a child and I am a child from a father and mother. This is a system of family. Father and Mother.

My first encounter with a system of school was meeting my first teacher in the United States of America. My first teacher met my system of family of Father and Mother. My mother knew English, but did not know the decisions of an English language when it came to Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day was known in the United States of America to offer a potential brother to be Bridegroom in the future of dreams for a Bride of Jesus Christ to love eachother as Husband and Wife. The system.

Valentine's Day.

My encounter with Valentine's Day in the United States of America was a bag full of candy and cards of hearts and sweet remarks of how special a person I was to another person. It was a system of knowing what to do on Valentine's Day.

And I liked to hear more about these systems, as I heard my mother agree with the system. My teacher instructed my mother of this system, which I later learned in my graduate program at California State University of San Bernardino a form called Assimilation. Assimilation into a culture of being an American in the United States of America. We were being assimilated into the country after leaving and immigrating from the country of the Philippine Islands. I could hear the assimilation, as I sat in a lecture room listening to my professors prepare us on the knowledge of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States of America. The graduate program is Education. And I graduated with a Master of Arts in Education. And I am now performing the deed of a Philosophy in Education at Harvard University.

What is the decision of Higher Education in the United States of America?

Is it to be elite?

It is to serve and instruct an understanding and knowledge to a future towards a greater knowledge. It is an authority to know and subjugate the production of knowledge through a system of education and school; and yet, to know it is a person we are instructing in a social atmosphere of living with one another from different backgrounds appreciated through an intellectual decision to see and know each other as human beings learning and seeing from each other how to be with each other in PEACE.

My knowledge of America comes clear through a military based decision to serve a country. To serve a country through education and instruction sounds very clear to me as teacher. To teach. What am I to teach in this system? And I learned about a system that offended me. A system that forgot about the intellectual freedom to decide. For instance, we have cashiers with cash registers. The system of mechanically calculating the product and price and total has to come through the hand of a person trusting a system we call a machine that calculates the beep of each grocery item. What if the machine calculates the total wrongly? Only a person can question this possibility of a machine malfunctioning. And I am a person. I believe this form of system that has malfunctioned in the heart of man is forgetting the hand that rocks the cradle. The hand that passes through every grocery item and asking whether the hand clicked the wrong item and did not calculate the right amount or the hand that simply said, "That's what the machine says and I ....."

And you will not question the machine as a person?

We are not computers. WE are PEOPLE!

People who have diverse integrated experiences into society into a world we call America. I have integrated a part of myself from the culture of the Philippine Islands. Another person may have integrated a part of him or herself from the culture of Nigeria. But what accepts these integrations is a system we call school and this is to be educated the various cultures that come all into ONE CLASSROOM through the guidance of a TEACHER who sees the WHOLE as ONE!

It is wonderful to find the United States of America accepting this through Harvard University.