Cathy Davidson's 'Project Classroom Makeover'

Traditions have been around for years, some being passed down from generation to generation while others are fairly new. Traditions explain why people act certain ways or why certain events happen. From academics, to cultures, to life, people follow their traditions because that is what they have always learned to do, reluctant to change the ways they have always lived. Many are scared of change, especially in traditions that have been around for so long, but changing traditional ways is inevitable because life is always changing. In “Project Classroom Makeover,” the author Cathy Davidson strongly supports changing the traditional education system because it is not keeping up with how modern students learn, with all these advances in technology

Change is always occurring in the world because nothing truly ever stays the same. Change is inevitable and occurs naturally. Eventually, old traditions will be broken and change into new traditions that will eventually be broken again. Education was bound to intertwine with technology, as almost everything in the world is slowly become technological. Duke University, back in the very beginning of the twenty-first century, used the new iPod to aid in their academics in a process called the iPod Experiment, which was “a start at finding a new learning paradigm of formal education for the digital era” (Davidson 55). Davidson brings up the iPod Experiment at Duke University to show that change is unstoppable because technological advances will soon be intertwining with almost everything as it did with formal education. Duke was an early pioneer in using technology to help in the classroom and to benefit students in their studies. Change is also inevitable when it comes to the subject of women’s rights and their equality to men. For the longest time, women were not considered equal to men and many times, considered to be lower to men, which spread the idea that women should always obey men. However, many women’s rights events have occurred since that idea and the concept of feminism has spread into the old traditions. At the Citadel, female students are frowned upon because their attendance breaks the old tradition of being a male-only institution but there are female presence around the campus. The Citadel “was by no means free of women. Female teachers were improving cadets’ minds, female administrators were keeping their records, and an all-female (and all-black) staff served the meals in the mess hall” (Faludi 74). Faludi talks about female staff at the Citadel to show that the campus is not really “male-only” because there are females around. They are