American Studies BA 3rd year
Course title: American Educational System
Student name: Mircea Stănciucu

Educational initiation into culture in post modernity

A. Educational initiation into culture

Initiation in culture and the acquisition of cultural tools are the most stringent requirements that school should meet now and always. Knowing to cultivate oneself, learning how to carefully use power to judge, to reason, to distinguish the false from the truth, good from evil, ugly from beauty, are qualities that have formed through schooling and this need increases itself as soon as it is stimulated. At some point, one does not even require guardianship regarding culturalization. Cultural plurality, once internalized, awakens and opens new possibilities. Thus, culture gives birth to culture. School should potentiate and develop in students the capacity for adaptability and understanding not only in terms of knowledge, but also that of true culture, knowing how to use what one knows to behave intelligently and lead a remorseless existence.
Conditions of modern life require that every human has to learn every day; school is where learning starts and this learning that the child receives should provide what is necessary so that, in the future, self-improvement would be employed: education and teaching are thus an initiation, an opening. A series of acquisitions of cultural goods, by their presence, does not guarantee empowerment of individuals. A genuine culture is actually a set of objects possessing two qualities while apparently contradictory: first, to proliferate in a horizon of universality, to flirt with transcendence and then allow an approximation of a single irreducible topic, to have potentiality of molding the individual in such a way to prepare him for the unpredictable. The elevation of a free individual requires not only a sharing of knowledge,