Justify The Knowledge Or It Will Be

Taught In Vain Essay, Research Paper

Justify the Knowledge or It Will be Taught in Vain

If you were to ask a teenager today if he or she would rather study or watch television, what do you think the answer would be. From what I have seen in myself when I was a teenager and in almost everyone that I meet, nobody would rather study. Today’s fast food culture has sucked the beauty out of individual thought and the acquirement of knowledge. Schools give an insufficient amount of knowledge on a variety of different topics and sub-topics without any encouragement of critical thought and analysis on the knowledge. Indeed, if schools required children to do so as a part of their education then the politicians, people of elite status, and teachers would be shown that the way they have been doing things, and they way they are doing things, is wrong. Some people who do actually think about things and disagree are rare not only because it’s hard to find interest in something public education has made arbitrary but because doing so results in being a social outcast. Some still disagree anyway. It is not allowed in the classrooms so they drop out of schools, die their hair black, get body piercings, become pessimists, and become stereotyped as trash to express their rebellion against being trained to think in a way that does nothing but confuse thought itself. The simple fact is that if young people were encouraged to change our current situation instead of being cast out and beaten down, these same tattooed drug addict losers would be Nobel Prize winners. Its not these rebels that are causing environmental problems, sucking up all the available resources at the expense of people living in poverty, and sending American jobs across the Mexican border for the sake of a greasy buck. It is not the individualist envisionary artists we call elements of a demoralized young generation that are over taxing the people to build machinery for wars that, most of time, are none of our damn business. It is not the gun carrying gangsters that are engaging in the politics of deception and manipulation to lie to the majority of “honest” people in this country and take their money to fulfill their bloodthirsty wallets at the cost of peoples lives. These proprietary social outcasts are defense mechanisms that result from the disgusting maginalization of the current system. Where does it all begin. In the public schools are the roots of the problem. What helps it. The media with its advertisement propaganda waters those roots. There are many problems in our society that spring from one thing: the miseducation of our children. There are many problems in the education of our children that spring from one thing: students are being taught what to think instead of how to think. The core of our education of children should not be the amount of material covered but the encouragement of thinking about the material which should be presented with a high degree of honesty with emphasis on awareness and responsibility.

On many occasions in public school I can remember inquiring on the importance of material only to be laughed at by the class. In eleventh grade English, designed for vocational students, we read “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. We read during class and each Friday had tests on the material without any discussion of our purpose for learning it. One day when I questioned why we needed to learn it and the class laughed at me. The teacher told me that it was just part of the curriculum required by the state. I can remember that adding to the anger and frustration of my already rebellious attitude. The rebellion that I felt at the time was against everything that I was being taught. I at the time, like most people, had grown repulsed by learning since the knowledge had been distributed in a way that made it seem like it was a waste of my time. There were seven class periods a day. Each class was less than an hour long and there was little time to go over the things of real importance. When things of real importance were “taught,” I had six other classes crowding in trying to choke any desire that might have been there to investigate the matters further. Consequently, books and knowledge brought to mind nothing but the meaningless boredom of the manner in which they were presented in school. Whether in school or out, reading books sucked. When that last bell rang it always sparked the conditioned thought of myself hanging out with friends, watching television, listening to music, smoking pot, and doing anything but being productive. Being productive seemed like something that old people do because they need to survive, not because it is something that they loved to do, and its perquisite implied hours of monotonous dedication to memorizing conceptual relics from a former epoch that have no relevant applicability to my modern life. Watching television consumed most of my out of school time since that was mostly what people in my surroundings talked about. Why was it important. It provided for my parents a relief from doing work that they do not enjoy all day. It provided for me and my fellow students an automatic identity and purpose since school had degraded the idea of constructing one from history, science, literature, and philosophy to meaningless syllables that invoked sleep.

If a public school student were to actually pay attention in school and manage to get an A, lets say, in hi