How
to Succeed in High School
Without
Really Learning
In Defense of Elitism, Renowned Pundit
Danny C. Benchimol
Voices his Qualms with Public Education
I have always wondered why
there are so many nimrods in my high school toting 90+ GPA’s, and so many brilliant
people with extremely sub par averages. Over the last four years, I have
discovered that to succeed in the public education system, a student must only
know how to “regurgitate” effectively.
But how can knowing something for a test on Monday morning and then
forgetting it by Tuesday constitute learning? Most students have been so
desensitized by the public education system that they are beyond understanding
the difference between memorization and conceptual learning. Anyone who can
effectively take notes and memorize them is said to be on the road to success.
It seems as though growing numbers of students are actually being rewarded for
pragmatic approaches toward education.
I am not trying to incriminate anyone, but what bothers me is how
dependant upon textbooks and note taking students have become. There have been
too many valedictorians that would be “lost” without their textbooks. Too many students have grown to accept the
pragmatism inherent in only knowing what is required of them. Consider this scenario: if a student spends
20 minutes debating affirmative action, in class, with his teacher, and opts to
read a book as opposed to spending two hours reiterating, via a banal homework
assignment, information on a topic in which he has already demonstrated
proficiency, he will be punished. The
only crime this person has committed is the rejection of a system that wants to
waste his time, which could be better served by intellectual expansion.
One possible solution lies in
alternative schools, or better yet, special programs, that are kept small and
personalized. These are not the type
that are for students who can’t cope, but those for students who can be trusted
to explore on their own, with certain provisions and checks, of course; like
subject areas that one must give a presentation of what has been learned. Adam
Smith, one of my favorite intellectuals, got the bulk of his education in the
basement of the Oxford library reading, analyzing, and thinking. This clearly
superior approach to learning is squelched by the confines of a rigid and
pragmatic institutional structure, and I am appalled that the majority of the
intellectual elite at my “elite” high school is not going to be included in the
top 25% of my graduating class.
The public education system
puts numbers above learning, and therefore, is anti-intellectual. Petty
memorization has replaced abstract thought.
The lesson to be learned is that what one might perceive to be learning
is nothing more than the ingestion, not digestion, of meaningless facts, only
for the purpose of “blowing chunks” on to the scantron sheet for the next test.
After this, these tidbits have outlived their utility and are to be cast back
into that bottomless pit of “all the stuff I ‘learned’ in high school that is
beyond recollection.”