Project 2 Final Draft - What Is Education For? by Sean Panameno

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:38:31 UTC

Background

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:55:55 UTC

Highest Court in New York decided that students have the constitutional right to a civic education. Lawyers for Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) argued that education is not merely for vocational properties but for civic agency. Civic participation was decided by the CFE to need a 12th-grade education minimum.

Civic Participation- Ability to participate and understand political events such as voting, debates, and policies

Vocational Education- Focuses on developing skills of students in the goal of preparing them for economic work and solely for the purpose of finding work

Main Claim

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:56:11 UTC

Allen argues that education should be used as a tool to prepare student for importance of participatory readiness and civic agency

Participatory Readiness- the ability for a citizens to be equally engaged in democracy and politics

Civic Agency- ability for citizens to act together to shape a collective; activism and leadership

Subclaim 1/Rebuttal

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:56:20 UTC

The vocational paradigm prepares students for the global economy but fails to address how economic inequality is a side product of politics. True equality needs civic education that develops participatory readiness.

Subclaim 2

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:56:29 UTC

The liberal arts are essential to build participatory readiness and provide the tools needed for a balanced civic education.

Evidence

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:57:25 UTC

The modern economy is a product of politics. It has been affected by the decisions made by the government making economic inequality a political issue.

Evidence

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:57:30 UTC

Disciplines provided by liberal arts teach the skills vital for informed citizenship

Evidence

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:57:34 UTC

Professionals have narrowed their view on education to the economic field and exclude any civic alternative. Technological oriented education is favored.

Evidence

seanpanameno — 2025-10-01 18:57:48 UTC

Students that studied majors in the humanities are further educated in political policies and have higher political participation

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-06 17:05:08 UTC

Both the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and Reagan administration report A Nation at Risk in 1983 increased funding for vocational training and mathematical education.

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-06 17:18:12 UTC

"Rewards would go, he said, to schools that develop more classes “that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math —the skills to day's employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future."

-Barack Obama

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-06 17:20:09 UTC

"Historical experience suggests that the principal mechanism for convergence [of incomes and wealth] at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. In other words, the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill, and education."

-Thomas Piketty, French Economist

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-06 17:30:13 UTC

"Data from the Department of Education reveal that, among 2008 college graduates, 92.8 percent of humanities majors have voted at least once since finishing school. Among STEM majors, that number is 83.5 percent. And, within ten years of graduation, 44.1 percent of 1993 humanities graduates had written to public officials, compared to 30.1 percent of STEM majors."

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-06 17:36:20 UTC

"High SAT verbal scores correlate with increased likelihood of political participation, while high SAT math scores correlate with decreased likelihood of participation."

-Research done by Sunshine Hillygus, Political Scientist

Counterclaim

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 21:25:28 UTC

Education under the vocational paradigm is important to prepare students for economic competitiveness in the global economy and combat wealth inequality

Vocational Paradigm- education modeled on focusing on vocational skills and preparing students for jobs

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 22:04:36 UTC

"Today’s world economy is the product of explicit decisions that governments had made in the past... It was the choice of governments to loosen regulations on finance and aim for full cross-border capital mobility, just as it was a choice to maintain these policies largely intact, despite a massive global financial crisis."

-Dani Rodrik, Economist

Evidence

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 22:05:55 UTC

Education focusing on STEM helps limit income inequality and provides students an even chance of getting similar paying jobs in a global economy

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 22:28:46 UTC

"the goal is to ensure that young people, and society generally, can compete in a global economy. This view is tightly connected to a technocratic economic policy that focuses on the dissemination of skills as a way to reduce in equality in a technology dependent economy. The result has been massively increased investment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education—STEM—and correspondingly reduced outlays for the humanities"

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 22:29:41 UTC

"The vocational approach imagines that this equal attainment will translate into a wider distribution of skills, which will reduce income inequality."

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 22:55:06 UTC

"To make judgments about the course of human events and our government’s role in them, we need history, anthropology, cultural studies, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology"

Subclaim 3

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 23:03:13 UTC

Civic education strengthens democracy by teaching how to politically participate and be engaged civic agents that are able to fight against multiple types of inequality.

Evidence

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 23:58:43 UTC

Civic education will help students develop the habits and skills needed to not only participate in democracy but also address inequalities.

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 23:58:50 UTC

"The ideal civic agent carries out all three of these tasks—disinterested deliberation, prophetic frame shifting, and fair fighting—ethically and justly."

Evidence

seanpanameno — 2025-10-12 23:58:55 UTC

Historical figures have been able to combat different forms of inequality, such as social or economical, by being outspoken and influencing political participation. Engagement in democracy is important to be able to unit and perform change as a collective.

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-13 00:11:56 UTC

"If we are to embrace an education for participatory readiness, we need to aim our pedagogic and curricular work not at any one of these three capacities but at what lies behind all of them: the idea of civic agency as the activity of co-creating a way of life. This view of politics supports all three models of citizenship because it nourishes future civic leaders, activists, and politicians. Such an education ought also to permit a reintegration of these roles."

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-13 00:18:19 UTC

"One might think of early women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage...Stanton is an example of this ideal at work. At the Seneca Falls Convention, she was in deliberative mode for the debate about the text of the Declaration of Sentiments. However, before the convention’s deliberations, when she drafted that text, she was in the prophetic mode, just as she was in her innumerable speeches. Finally, in campaigning for legal change, as in the adoption of the Woman's Property Bill in New York and similar laws in other states, she was operating as an activist."

Data

seanpanameno — 2025-10-13 00:18:22 UTC

"Second is prophetic work intended to shift a society’s values; in the public opinion and communications literature, this is now called "frame shifting.” Think of the rhetorical power of nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Martin Luther King, Jr., or of Occupy Wall Street activists with their rallying cry of "we are the 99 percent."