America the Ignorant
Note: This post also appears on the blog But I Can Hear You.
Recently I've been noticing some things at my school which seriously disturb me. You see, school is almost over and so the teachers are piling record amounts of work on us. (Not that I'm complaining, I'm just stating the fact that workload at school has increased sharply.) One of these end of the year papers involved a writing assignment in which we were to answer a simple question. Basically it went something like, "do people imitate others?" A few days ago we got the results back. My teacher talked for a while about the results and showed us some photocopies of essays that had received a very high score. The first essay contained the following mistakes.
-referred to Alexander Graham Bell as "Alexander Grand Bell"
-stated that Thomas Edison invented the telephone
-stated that the Mona Lisa was a painting of a man's face on one side and a woman's on the other.
-capitalized words such as inspiration and individual but not Christ or God.
What worries me is not that the student made these mistakes, but that the teachers decided to score his essay highly. My friend and I asked my teacher about it and he explained that the student rated highly because he used examples to support his argument."But the examples are wrong!" argued my friend. The teacher's response? Hey, at least they were there. Dear God, what kind of school am I in that ignorance is rewarded? Basically the school is saying is that as long as you use examples, who cares if you don't know what you're talking about? I call this phenomenon 'bullshot.' Shoot as much bull as you can out there and some of it will find its mark. Apparently it works. The second essay scared me even more. The examples of individuality, or lack thereof, the student gave were from the following sources.
-Disney/Pixar children's movie "The Incredibles"
-Adam Sandler movie "Big Daddy"
-NASCAR Drivers
This apparently ranked highly as well. While the teacher is praising this ridiculousness I'm wondering when Adam Sandler became a philosopher. When did "the Incredibles" replace Dante, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu and Rand as sources for English essays? I think I know when. It was when teachers started worrying about hurting the students' feelings rather than doing their job. It was when schools turned into processing plants, passing students because they wanted to get them to the next grade rather than educate them. The people who wrote these essays are the voters of tomorrow, and they get all their information off of Disney and Adam Sandler. That scares me. I think that if schools are serious about educating us they should start by not tolerating such things. Essays need to be graded by quality, not quanity. Putting examples to support your argument is useless if you don't know what you're talking about. Put simply, "the Incredibles" as a source is simply that, not credible, and such ridiculousness cannot be rewarded if we are serious about educating America
posted by Anonymous @ 5:02 PM
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