About me- Hari Devaraj

Hello fellow Alternative breakers. My name is Hari Devaraj and I’m a freshman Electrical Engineering major. I was born near College Park in Rockville, Maryland and attended Richard Montgomery High school like my two older sisters, but my family is originally from Bangalore, India. On campus I’m part of the Hindu Student Council and I’m thinking of joining QUEST.

My main hobbies are running and reading. Recently I've started reading a lot about behavioral economics, which looks to understand the forces that motivate us and cause us to make risky decisions. This kind of ties into why I joined the Alternative breaks program, I’m interested in understanding how systemic problems in an education system alters a person’s view of the world and decision making process. But I don’t believe that I can pick up this knowledge from a textbook, which is why I’m excited to go to Chicago this spring break and meet kids who want more from their education.

While this isn't an article, I found a neat video that analyzes the shortcomings of 21st century public education. This video looks at the current education paradigm as trying to meet two main goals: 1) to make children have the skills required to meet the needs of a globalized world and 2) to try and pass on a cultural identity to the next generation. The video suggests that public education lies on 19th and 20th century assumptions about the value of an education, namely that all educated people need to have a thorough understanding of the classics and a capacity for a specific type of deductive reasoning that is dictated by the school. This type of reasoning alienates students that don't think in the same way as the school system, and this same type of reasoning suggests that only students who can succeed in this school system can succeed in life.