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For Immediate Release
Nader lost election.
Aw, shucks!
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Link.
webcrawler.com
A MESSAGE FROM ME!
Headline for today:
My analysis for today:
“I Wants To Go To The Prose” Summary Response Essay Wade Wainio
“Compromising The Suzanne Britt Jordan Vision”
In the essay, Suzanne Britt Jordan claims to be able to see quite clearly why students fail academically. In her opinion, failure of a student does not start at home or in the teachers’ office or the classroom, but within the student. In some ways this statement is true, though Britt Jordan sees it in a fairly awkward light. She suggests that our school systems have been too easy on failing students and that students have been manipulating teachers with emotional conceit in order to pass courses. The writer claims that she does not tolerate laziness, be it within a student or in a teacher. However, she uses the irrational argument that we need more aggressive teachers like the ones America had in the days of old, and that schools are designed to “teach.” Britt Jordan writes fondly of such teachers: “They were hard, even at times unjust, but when they were through, we knew those multiplication tables blindfolded and with both trembling hands tied behind our backs.” In other words, we should quit lending our education system to an “army of psychologists” and leave it in the hands of brutal dictator-like administrators. Would our school children learn much while imprisoned? Many urban schools, if not a majority of urban schools, already have video surveillance cameras in them and large fences to cordon them off from the rest of the world in metropolitan areas. But would students, be they 18-year-olds or grade school students, learn anything more from an educational prison anyway (especially the ones who are faced with declining test scores due to their own “stupidity and laziness)?” Britt Jordan alludes to these types of students as: “The poor, disadvantaged victims of broken homes, the misfits, the unloved.” She knows the type, as do we all. But what happens when schools become high security institutions? What would troubled students do with themselves? Simple: nothing; the teachers would do everything for them. This is the very same problem that Britt Jordan is so uneasy about.
School is an institution wherein we learn that self-governing is not as efficient as a workable scheme. As students, we learn to rely on the administrators for learning—a big mistake, especially when a teacher does not know the subject very well. I never recall being told that “no one was ever given an education; they’ve had to take it for themselves.” How can you engage the material without actually engaging the material? You just can’t when you live in the real world, and as Britt Jordan says: life is real. But perhaps there is some truth to Britt Jordan’s vision, but we simply have to compromise her vision with the contemporary theme of our educational system. Perhaps this is where the answer lies.
So our education system stinks. Why not use what are we given instead? The answer is obvious: prisons. Prisons are the fastest growing sector of our economy, and we have the highest prison population in the industrialized world.
Now that it is becoming politically savvy for politicians to speak of lowering the age limit for criminals, and there’s a resurgence in prison labor in America, perhaps schools could take a hint and start making profit from “arts and crafts day” in grade schools. That way our students could all learn to respect teachers who are “hard, even at times unjust” as well as get punished for lack of skill, which is the lesson that Britt Jordan is so fond of. Or what if children were to spend a few hours of their day designing shirts for the school systems and the teachers they know and love to sell. Pay the kids maybe 15 cents an hour or something for allowance money (or maybe they can learn to value their work most by doing it for free); allow them a fifteen or twenty minute break so they can buy something from the Pepsi vending machine or feed them a bowl of rice; and then it’s “back to work.” Some companies already use public schools to extract personal information from children—this is just a step further “in the right direction.”
Such respectable principles as teachers determining what curriculum students will study and respect most in life may hold some answers. Case in point: Mike Cameron, 19, a Senior at Greenbrier High School in Evans, GA, was suspended for one day for wearing the Pepsi t-shirt on official Coke Day. The principal and body of teachers at Greenbrier who allowed for his suspension are definitely enforcing the message that “misfits will not be tolerated.” Procter and Gamble has been informing students with a package of material called 'Decision Earth', which was distributed to almost 75,000 schools in the US. One of the lessons that the package teaches is: “Clear cutting removes all trees within a stand of a few species to create new habitat for wildlife. Procter & Gamble uses this economically and environmentally sound method because it most closely mimics nature's own processes... Clear cutting also opens the forest floor to sunshine, thus stimulating growth and providing food for animals." Now that’s what I call education.
As Suzanne Britt Jordan says: “Life is real.” Wouldn’t it be great if we could all turn out to be what those “fearsome, awe-inspiring experts” would want us to be? This has all be a very imaginative way to compromise Britt Jordan’s vision for children with the vision that contemporary America already has in mind, wouldn’t it? And if they don’t want to learn these lessons, well fine, we’ll just flunk them. Teach them to: “Stay in the class where you belong.” “Surrender your will to our predestined chain of command." “Learn the lesson that further learning can only come from fear.” “Believe that your intelligence and abstract ideas can best be judged through our grade point average system and that our tests really deserve the level of importance that we tell you they have.” When these are the lessons learned, why would a brood smoke marijuana and drink wine on their morning bus routes? It’s not like they haven’t been led to believe that life is cheap and that nothing they do matters--so we should counsel troubled students less. On a related note: Maybe we need more drug-sniffing dogs and police cars to patrol our schools as well. We all know that drug-related crimes are a major problem, and we all know that many districts with drug abuse problems are riddled with poverty; so why not give kids community service jobs so poor counties don’t have to pay those pesky wage increases that are often demanded by people who make a living working at “jobs?” (Ironically, I must say that it is odd that “community service” is looked at as a punishment…but that has nothing to do with what children learn in school or anything, it’s because those students are stupid and lazy. Cable in the classroom—AKA “Channel One”—doesn’t encourage laziness at all, of course, and pep assemblies are intellectually stimulating).
So, I suppose it isn’t like we haven’t been giving the Suzanne Britt Jordan vision a chance. She just doesn’t feel that kids are learning enough and are being poorly managed. As the saying goes: “If you like school, you’ll love work.” And in the even more classic formulation: “Government must guarantee equal opportunity, not equal results.” I like a good slogan, as do a lot of people. Slogans put all of my complex ideas and thoughts into simple terms that are easy to use, which is also why I liked high school. Teachers are not nearly instructive enough. We don’t need those lovey-dovey, touchy-feely teachers who have this wacky idea that compassion can help a kid learn. I want to learn from a teacher who will flunk me “without pausing in his lecture on frog dissection.”
Were our nation’s schoolchildren given a financial incentive to learn (the aforementioned 15 cents a day, or some such rate of payment), maybe they would be much more apt to appreciate the valuable skills that they are learning. Maybe they could learn the lesson that Britt Jordan learned: “My job means too much to me to sacrifice my standards and turn soft.” Students should not want to be turned soft either. Maybe if “big blond bruiser” football stars were drilled more as students, they would gain even more of the necessary respect for the important skills they exhibit. When it comes to athletes, their important skills mean a lot to themselves, and the sports stadiums that go up, along with the prisons, are all part of a great scheme to enhance the intellect and character of communities nationwide. We learn more by being spectators, or at least that’s what I’ve been told.
As the author so aptly states: “The function of schools, their first and primary obligation, is not to probe tender psyches, to feed and clothe the homeless, nor to be the papa and mama a kid never had. The job is to teach.” The job of a school system is not to be soft. Athletes get rewarded mostly for not being soft. But even as Britt Jordan points out, not all athletes are super-intelligent beings. Punishing some sports stars for being dumb would make them learn more, right? Of course it would--why wouldn’t it? It is important that kids learn that their high school is number one, no matter what the opposing teams say about themselves, because in the spectatorship of life, we all strive to sit in the section of the audience that we can identify with; the section that educators can’t seem to face.
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E-MAIL ME AT prestonchurch@hotmail.com
