He quotes H.L. Mencken (April 1924) who says that schooling aims to “reduce students to a standard safe level.” He criticizes the Prussian system which America adopted from Germany as the worst since it is designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and ensure docile and incomplete citizens -all in order to render the populace “manageable. He challenges people to identify the ills of modern schooling and chose to do the opposite- teach kids to think critically and independently, help our kids to develop inner dialogue in order to overcome boredom and urge them to take up serious material like history, literature, philosophy, music, art, theology and economics. His solution is simple and glorious; “let [children] manage themselves”
The capacity for society to revert back into accepting atrocities is why Wiesel’s formulates his speech to caution the audience. When Wiesel states that, “these failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity” (Wiesel 533), he is implying that these moments of darkness in history have been justified in people’s minds. Humanity’s illusion is that this was just brief periods in the past that will not happen again. That is the confusion that Wiesel hopes to discard through his speech by informing the audience through multiple examples of indifference. He induces a state of depression to make the audience receptive to his persuasion through pathos.
Nacirema is American spelled backwards. Throughout the article, Miner, strived to prove how ethnocentric we, Americans, are through sociological imagination. Reading the article without knowing it is about Americans will put a person in the point of view of an outsider from a different culture. We think the tribe, Nacirema, thinks that the human body is ugly and its natural leaning to weakness and disease is an awful thing, and that their only hope to avoid these characteristic of the human body, is to keep up with their daily rituals. Americans are always trying to come up with new ideas to prevent natural aging, the deterioration, and weakness of the body.
People lose pieces of themselves, and sometimes, they don’t even know it. They lose the piece that makes them who they are, their humanity and this is all because of totalitarian social control, which obviously is dehumanizing. In Orewell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it is seen that totalitarian social control is in fact, dehumanizing. There are some unanswered questions regarding these two novels, “Are these works warnings about the dehumanization effects of totalitarian social control?” It is believed that it is a warning. All forms of social control led to dehumanization in both 1984 and Brave New World, from monitoring telescreens, to the use of soma.
“The Moral Hazard Myth” by Malcolm Gladwell Why do many people in today’s American society feel the need to be insured and those who without, think, as Gladwell quotes, “remain uninsured as a matter of choice.”? (Gladwell 244) In his article “The Moral Hazard Myth,” Malcolm Gladwell analyzes about the health industry and healthcare realities of Americans today. He successfully proves the idea of “Moral Hazard” has shaped a private health care system that leaves millions of people behind without coverage. Gladwell aims to expose how the concept of moral hazard has played a major role in shaping our failing health care system. By catching the reader’s attention, he uses vivid imagery, facts and statistics, and emotional anecdotes.
They suggest that a happy person tends to pay less attention to details and information for fear that over-analysing the information may affect their happy state (Ottati and Isbell, 68). However, a sad person tends to deeply analyse information in the hope of enhancing or repairing their unhappy situation (Ibid.). Another important point made by the two authors is that people interpret their negative feelings as results of defects in their environment (Ibid. ), which then motivates them to scrutinize everything around them. The population’s state of fear is an example of a negative mood which then leads to the population believing that there’s a defect in their environment.
It is useful for highlighting why, in the working class, those who cannot achieve in education, they then therefore suffer from status frustration and in this process turn to other people who also cannot achieve in this institution. Thus, explaining why deviance subcultures exist. This theory of status frustration is said to focus too much on utilitarian crime which is committed for material gain, but what it does not say much about is the explanation for why people commit non-utilitarian crimes like vandalism and assault. Cohen realised this and backed up this explanation by talking about alternative status hierarchy. When working class boys find that they cannot perform well in mainstream education, they look at the values of not only the education system, but the values in modern society and turn them upside down, by valuing the opposite.
One problem that people have really with these kinds of wars is that they only focus on the bad things and what goes wrong in them. These ignorant people let the ever so negative media make their decisions on why wars like these are wrong. The media only ever has seemed to show the bad sides of everything and unfortunately the majority of the people in this country watch about five minutes of the news, only watch and see the bad sides of these wars, and continue on about the business only knowing and thinking “oh the _____ war is so dumb we aren’t accomplishing anything whatsoever!” Take another war for example the War in Iraq. We entered it to really try and establish ‘peace in the middle east’. Again sadly people flip on the television; see the reports reporters found of Iraqis begging that we get out that we have only made things worse, they see that our government spends too much money on the war, and that x amount of soldiers died that day.
Matt Murphy Non-Film Response February 28th, 2012 In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Chapter 4 The book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, delineates the major flaws in higher education from the biased perspective of a struggling adjunct professor who assumes the pseudonym “Professor X”. In the Professors somewhat cynical, highly sarcastic style of writing, he explains his critical (arguably controversial) point, that not every person is fit for higher education and that America itself is to blame. His misanthropic attitude towards the education system seems to be a product unquestionably trying life experiences, which in turn makes it hard to gage the legitimacy of all his criticism. In chapter 4, The four stages of a plot, Professor X compares his experiences and struggles in real estate to the classic four phase literary form of short stories; exposition, rising action, climax and denouement. He describes his lower class upbringing in the exposition, his slow but steady progression to middle class in the rising action, and his poorly considered big move to a substancial home putting him in major dept and forcing to become an adjunct professor for extra income in the climax.
In his essay, “Standardized Tests: Shouldn’t We Be Helping Our Students” Colorado State University student Eric Boese (2011) passionately expresses his assertions that standardized testing is degrading the quality of American education; he argues (specifically with the intent to persuade readers and in particular test policy setting politicians) that standardized tests are too difficult and fail to properly measure and motivate the qualitative performance of both teacher and student. This reader takes