Friday, January 11, 2008
Suggestions are Nice Too
George Saunders writes about a society, which is being perpetually inundated with ill-informed, quasi-sensationalist media in “The Braindead Megaphone.” He tells us that our society is effectually becoming dumber because apparently, our peevish minds cannot rise above the volume of the money-grubbing voices that now run our newspapers, magazines, and so-forth. Saunders informs us that, alas, there is a simple solution. He essentially calls for a high degree of skepticism and asks the masses to implore “…specificity and aplomb and correct logic.” Now, it would be great if Americans could suddenly lift the veil of idiocracy, which we have helped the media to pull over our eyes. Yet, I would say the problem runs much deeper, than can be corrected by looking through the lens of skepticism. I believe the problem lies within the nation’s youth, and it’s largely rooted in the public education system. A focus on state implemented standardized tests has violently shoved teaching students about the world, government, etc. to the outskirts of the scholastic curriculum. In an academic arena where the principle focus is on maximizing test scores, we can hardly expect the students produced to be adept at detecting fallacies, half-truths, or arguments of questionable logic in the media. Thus, while Saunders’s be skeptical mentality is a nice suggestion, it’s far from a reasonable solution in a society whose future constituents have not received the tools at the academic level, that would enable them to utilize “…specificity and aplomb and correct logic.”
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2 comments:
The ability to take a moment and look deeper into the issue that George Sanders presents is both intuitive and a display of someone who, like me, hate it when the true problem is glossed over with an insufficient solution. Americans will not one day just wake up and decide not to live in fear because of what the media is gushing into their living rooms. First a change in education is necessary. In The Closing of the American Mind By Allen Bloom he states in his Preface that the “liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows other worthy of consideration”. The focus in our school systems has gotten so far away from producing thinkers that it puts American children on a “conveyer belt type education” and reproduces over and over again products of standardized testing. Which as Rachel puts it “we can hardly expect the students produced to be adept at detecting fallacies, half-truths, or arguments of questionable logic in the media” and therefore the expectation of an enlightened American audiences is noble, but unrealistic if we continue on the line of education we have established in this country.
The problem with blaming standardized tests as the downfall of education in America is that it is too simple of an answer. Not only are standardized tests incredibly political, the jury is still out on how much they harm/help our students in the world market. As warm and fuzzy as producing “thinkers” sounds, we need to remember that we need engineers, scientists and computer programmers also.
The education system is in need of help, but there is a difference between teaching knowledge and teaching thought. As much as I agree that more of us should be skeptics, I am not sure that NEA members are the ones to indoctrinate our youth on what to question during primary education.
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