"Discrimination, a view of Idealism and Materialism"

Outline.



Introduction:


This essay will relate the play “The Tempest” written by William Shakespear between 1610-1611 with an issue we have dealing over years which is discrimination and also to make the relation with how discrimination is developing in society. But the main purpose of this paper is to see how this issue has kept at schools from many years, and give some suggestions so that teachers can be aware of it and make a change.


Body:

I. 1) Definition of discrimination.
2) History from colonialism until now (21st century).
3) How it is represented in “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare.

II. 1) What is going on at schools.
2) How teachers can deal with discrimination.



Conclusion:


To conclude, it is clear that there are diffent types of discrimination and it is divided into categories, such as direct or indirect discrimination. And it is not something that we can step forward and forget it because it is occurring nowadays, and they way teachers do their work is crucial to have a change. Thus, teachers must be aware of this in order to know how to teach what they have to.



"Discrimination, a view of Idealism and Materialism"



This essay will relate the play “The Tempest” written by William Shakespear between 1610-1611 with an issue we have dealing over years which is discrimination. To start this essay it is necessary to define in general terms what discrimination is, it is also important to write some history about this from colonialism until 21st century in which we are living. After these definitions it is possible to show how it is represented in the play, and from that to make the relation with how discrimination is developing in society. But the main purpose of this paper is to see how this issue has kept at schools from many years, and give some suggestions so that teachers can be aware of it and make a change.

Discrimination is a term that we all think we know, but if someone asks you to give a definition of discrimination, would you know how to answer that with a clear definition? Maybe yes or maybe not because all depends on your point of view of discrimination. Therefore, some definitions has to be given to have it clear in your mind. According to what the dictionary says, “discrimination is the act of separate, dstinguish, differentiate one thing from another, or to tret others differently because of racial, religious, political or aconomical reasons”. Now, if this definition is analysed, it is possible to see that to discriminate can be used in a positive way in the case that we have to distinguish, however most of its use is close to the negative side, so another definition according to the book “The Social Meaning of Discrimination”, Aaron Antonovsky says that “discrimination may be defined as the effective injurious treatmentof persons on grounds rationaly irrelevant to the situation. Individuals are denied desired and expected rewards or opportunities for reasons related not to their capacities, merits or behavior, but solely because of membership in an identifiable out-group”(86). This last side of discrimination may be expressed in two ways, it may be directly or indirectly. (1) Direct discrimination is when a person is treated less favourably due to his/her characteristics, such as sex, parental status, race, age or disability. (2) Indirect discrimination is when a policy or procedure has a positive result for one person or a group of people and negative effects on another person or group of people.

Since many years, in fact many centuries, discrimination has been present in actions done by the man or woman. It comes from the very beginning, when Europians started to colonize other continents. When the conquerors arrived America, they saw indigenous people living in the continent with a very a different life style that was simpler (not saying that it was easier) because of its naturality. It was totally opposite to the way Europian conquerors lived. They had different principles, habits, customs and beliefs which made them think that they were civilized, superior than the indigenous because they had the money, and they also think they were more intelligent because they received formal education. They were also different phisicaly, terefore, in this period, indigenous people became Europians’ slaves, so they were treated as inferiors and conquerors took control by imposing their culture (let’s understand culture as ideals, religion, habits, etc) as the right one. This way of “educating people” caused resistance in the people who belonged to those colonized lands and it also caused the death of many who fought hard against this imposition. It happened to indigenous people in America, colonized by the Spanish crown, and it happened to African people colonized by Great Britain as well. Thanks to these examples, it’s easy to make a relation with the definition of direct and indirect discrimination explained in the second paragraph. During colonization, direct discrimination was obviously represented in the feelings of superiority that conquerors had because of the differences in the way they both lived, so they didn’t understand nor accept other way of living, and of course the color of the skin was determiner. Not just direct discrimination occurred but indirect discrimination was also present and important in their process of cultural imposition. Conquerors imposed their ideals by lieing to indigenous, especially in terms of religion. Indigenous couldn’t keep their faith and their beliefs because Europians brought Catholic religion argumenting that it was the right one. This is the religion imposed by imperialism and colonialism that is strongly alive and extended all over the world as the main religion. That is indirect discrimination which also can be seen as the idealism of conquerors over the materialism of colonized people. English has also been extended all over the world as the important language, and even as a second language in many countries. In the case of South America, many foreign companies are setting up and are even more powerful than the companies that belong to this part of the Continent. For example, nowadays there are many Mc Donalds that don’t leave space for South American restaurants. All this is happening because we are living in the age of a new imperialism in which direct and indirect discrimination is a day by day issue.

In “The Tempest” is a story based in times when colonialism was taking part in History. In this play, the idealism that prospero has over the materialism in the Caliban is discrimination. The Caliban is Prospero’s slave because he is different, everybody see the Caliban as the monster who only acts by instinct and has no moral, thus Prospero impose him ideals and treat him badly. Prospero doesn’t let him be by trying to take away all the materialism or naturality that is the inner part of the Caliban. It is the same to what happened to indigenous and African people when imperialism was taking over of the world. Even though it was not the main topic of the play, Shakespeare in a way showed us how discrimination occured. It is still happening nowadays, especially at schools where students represent the Caliban, someone with no habits and no moral at all that has to be educated by teachers who represent Prospero. Regarding this, the educational reality at schools is like that, but in many cases it is not the school’s fault but it is the teachers viewpoint. Most of the teachers see students as people who have to be hardly educated, so they usually impose their ideals, to what students put up resistance because they are forced to change just as Prospero did to the Caliban. Instead of forcing students to learn, teachers must invite them to do it and in that way there would be less resistance from students to learn because they feel discriminated when the teacher doesn’t share the same ideals with them or they are not understood by the teacher. As discrimination is everywhere it is extremely important that teachers know how to deal with it and to be caruful on what they teach and how they teach it. If students have to learn vocabulary, the teacher has to be explicit and say what words can be offensive and in what context they can be used. For example, the word black may be offensive if a white person calls an Afro American black.

To conclude, it is clear that there are diffent types of discrimination and it is divided into categories, such as direct or indirect discrimination. Besides, both types of discrimination were part of the colonialization process and of course they are represented in Shakespeare play “The Tempest” which took place in an island that had not been colonized. And unfortunately, it is not something that we can step forward and forget it because it is occurring nowadays, and they way teachers do their work is crucial to have a change. Thus, teachers must be aware of this in order to know how to teach what they have to.










Bibliography.





Antonovsky Aaron. “The Social Meaning of Discrimination”. Clark Atlanta University, 1960.


Shakespear William. “The Tempest”. Classic Books Company, 2001.


Carol A. Wong, Jacquelynne S. Eccles and Arnold Sameroff. “The Influence of Ethnic Discrimination and Ethnic Identification on African American Adolescents’ School and Socioemotional Adjustment”. Journal of Personality, 2003.



Wikimedia Foundation. “Caliban”. June 13th. 2009.

struggles and desires of revenge

The merchant of Venice, a movie in which the main characters are Shylock, a jewish; Antonio, a rich merchant, and Basanio, Antonio’s best friend who asks Antonio for a loan in order to get merry to the heir of Belmont throne, Porcia. Nevertheless, as Antonio had invested all his money on merchant navy expeditions, he doesn’t have money and he has to ask Shylock for it in order to help Basanio. Now the worst comes. Shylock accepts to lend the money to Antonio but with a condition because he had been humiliated by Antonio due to being jewish, therefore it is his chance to take revenge on him. The contract they both agreed is that if Antonio doesn’t give the money back on time, he will have to pay with a pound of meat from his body.

Days before Antonio went to Shylock’s house, he had spat on Shylock’s face by saying that jewish people had to be treated as dogs because they did not deserve to be treated as christians were treated. Therefore, Shylock decided to lend the money not as a favor to help Antonio but to take revenge on him for what he had done. Whether Antonio did not have the money on time to pay the loan, then it was Shylock’s chance to return all the pain and humiliation he had lived because of belonging to a different religion.

The struggle between religions is what called my attention , especially when jewish were humiliated by christians. It happened because christians wanted to persuade all the people to follow their beliefs and it didn’t matter if it was violently, what they really cared about was to get more people into their religion. But jews kept their faith strong even though they were embarrased in front of everybody. All this invited Shylock to have the desire of revenge, but it got stronger when he knew that his only daughter left him by running away with a man in Basanio’s navy. Thus, now Shylock’s desire of revenge changed into desire of justice because they had taken his daughter, Jessica away from him. Money was not so important now but he only wanted his daughter back and hurt Antonio. It is really reasonable that Shylock wanted Antonio to pay for all the humiliation and also because Jessica had escaped with a Basanio’s man in order to have justice, because he loved his daughter and he had the need to have someone to pay for that.

When the deadline for Antonio to give the money back came, he felt desperate because his business didn’t go well, so he didn’t have money to pay and he probably would die. Antonio is takenb to court by Shylock, where he has to be judged according to what was stipulated in the contract. Here is when Basanio arrives and with the money to the court, and he even brings twice the money that Antonio has to pay. Minutes later, Porcia, Basanio’s wife, arrives but dressed as a man and takes over of the judgement. She tries to persuade Shylock to not take the pound of meat he wants from Antonio, but Shylock just wants to take the piece of meat. Finally, the judgement resul is that first, he can not take any piece of meat from Antonio; second, half of the money is for Antonio and the other half for the State; and third which is more painful for Shylock, he has to give up his jew faith and become a christian. I think what happened in the judgement is the worst side of the movie because Shylock lost everything.

Shylock is a good character and the one I was more focused on while I was watching the movie and what I liked from him is the courage, his attitude and behavior towards christians, because he could not be nice to them after all what they did to jews.Unfortunately, he lost what he loved the most, which was his daughter and his religion. From my point of view, this movie shows how Christian religion has been taking over through time. It is totally unacceptable that some people force other to give up something really important as is religion. When Antonio said to Shylock that he had to become a christian I felt anger because I put myself in Shylock’s shoes and I thought that I could never change my Rasta faith for any religion, even though I could be killed if I deny.

Outline Film Review

I will talk abot the opposition between Shylock and Antonio.

Possible title: Desire of revenge.

- Introduction ( summary of the story).

- The contract between Shylock and Antonio.

- The struggle between two religions.

- Shylock's desire of revenge.

- How Shylock fails in his attempt of revenge.

- Conclusion.

The Fairy Queene

This letter was a difficult text to understand, at least for me. The way it was written is what makes it hard to get the meaning at the first I read it.

Now that I know what an allegory is, I think this letter was an interesting way to critique the King. This letter takes place in the Fairy land of a Fairy Queen, which makes it something unreal, helping Spencer's purpose. Spencer wrote this letter to say what he disliked from the Kingdom such as social, political and religious issues by giving a hidden message in order to not be punished. He talked about King Arthur because he was virtuous. The witer wanted protection and that’s why he decided to say everything he thought was wrong by giving a message that could just be understood between the lines and not explicitly.

Afer reading the letter and writing this post, I must say that I liked this way of writing because it makes people thought beyond of what is in the paper.

What's women desire?

Although we can not expect the same from every women because not all of them have the same point of view of what role they want in the world or have different desires, I might say that the woman from the tail was not so different from the kind of woman we see now. However she was totally different from the stereotype of women at those times. Her rebel thoughts and her desires of independence were as what many women at these times want. She wanted to feel free by showing that she had the power of decision in her relationships, be respected for what she did more than for what she was, a woman. This woman’s desire was to be understood in a narrow minded society, just as the women’s desire from the 21st century. Maybe a difference could be that many women now, look for someone who can protect them and make a life in order to feel safe, which is the contrast of what the woman from the tail did. She was so self confident that she did not have the need of a man to do something. That’s why this woman went against the world and society’s rules, shouting for her real needs as a woman.

"Truth" by Chaucer.

I think that Chacer called this poem "Truth" because the message he wants to give is that most of the people don't say the truth about their lives and if they change that characteristic, and say the truth, then they will find the way to freedom. That's why he mentions the frase "for greed entails hate and social climbing uncertainty" refering to those who show others a reality which has nothing to do with what they live. Trying to be what they are not, having many things which they even can not afford. All this just to climb in society by living a false life.

This poem is related to religious beliefs. We can find this relation when he thanks God and also asks us to let our spirit be led because the truth shall deliver us. It means that if we say the truth, as God willing, we will be free.

All what he says is related to reality, adn that's what I thought afetr reading this beautiful poem. Many people don't cherish what they have or don't feel proud of the simple things that life gives. They give importance to material things just to live like others and to fit in higher status. It is a real issue in society, people living in lies losing themselves and selling their souls.

My definition of an epic poem

I would define an epic poem as something that tells ancient stories of Kings and Wars. It is the kind of poetry that use old fashioned language in order to Express the history in a beautiful way. Maybe epic poems don`t tell real stories and go into the fiction to show the beautiful side of those ancient wars.