Course Discussion

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Re: Discussion Question for Week 3

From: Leah Knauf
Date: 26 Oct 1999
Time: 00:22:20
Remote Name: 137.142.13.116

Comments

In response to the film "Love's Labors" I think the film favors the approach of the environmentalist debate because it shows that children are taught by their parents to learn how to communicate. No child knows how to talk when they are born, the people that teach them are their parents. The children learn the sound of words and attach meaning to them based on how they see their parents communicating with each other. With the deaf family that the film showed, they had to learn to communicate another way then through sound because it doesn't mean anything to them. They had to learn to depend on their other senses that function normally in order to communicate. They can still do it as efficiently as people who aren't deaf because they formed a symbolic language through their uses of gestures that is meaningful to them because they understand it. On the issue of being developmentally socialized in a total institution, I would agree that this process has worked to expand my "life of the mind." College is a good type of social institution because it allowed me to have experiences that I never would have had otherwise. There are so many different people that have totally different opinions and issues have been brought up that I never knew about. It has helped me to think more openly about certain topics and different people because I'm able to see their point of view now and change my thinking according to what I have learned. This has contributed to individuation and transformation in my experience because college is a place where you are allowed to have your own opinion and you don't have to follow the crowd as much as when you were in high school. You are valued for being an individual who has their own thoughts and beliefs and this allows people to feel more comfortable in becoming the person they really want to be. It also transforms you because you experience so many different things that you have a whole new way of thinking about things and this may change you from the person that you were before.