Monday, November 12, 2007

Entitlement Education

~300 word response~

Entitlement Education caught my attention because it responded to a book about consumerism in education. Bruno added to the book that the problem is actually entitlement education—expecting to get good grades for little effort. He implied that schools were not teaching the correct way that would enable the student to succeed in his or her future job. For instance, he said that the students are not getting enough intelligence, “This argument claims that a person’s intelligence contributes to his quality of life. Here we must remember that ‘intelligence’ is not just ‘knowledge.’ Instead, it is being able to use knowledge, to make connections and figure things out, to see causes and solve problems.” In other words, being able to use knowledge is intelligence.

Bruno also adds that students are being cheated out of ordinary cultural knowledge. This leads the students to miss out on intellectual conversations. It was also appropriate that he said, “The students who are allowed to slide by, who are content to slide by, who perhaps don’t even realize that they are sliding by because sliding by is all they know—those students find themselves arriving at college less prepared and less motivated than the ‘better students.’ And what happens next? Sadly, the gap between these two groups grows even wider.” This quote says that once the students go to college—smart or not smart—they panic and the gap between the smarter students and not smart students increases dramatically just because colleges require you to think—to use the information that you acquired in high school.

This all relates to me because I have just started college. I have been getting poor grades my first quarter because I am just now learning to use the knowledge I gained from high school—I’m starting to become more intelligent. I was getting strait A’s when I was in high school because I was sure good at being knowledgeable, but now I have to start being intelligent.

Writing Strategies:
2.) Bruno defines "intelligence" in his essay. How is this definition important? Might he have deleted this definition without damaging his essay?

The definition of "intelligence", in this essay, is very important because it distinguished between knowledge and intelligence. The definition, “…being able to use knowledge, to make connections and figure things out, to see causes and solve problems.”, gives a better understanding of why knowledge isn’t all that a student needs—it’s the intelligence that they must acquire. So, it would have been very damaging if Bruno left this definition out because it is vital to making the reader understand his point.

Exploring Ideas:
4.) How might you respond to Bruno's essay with an essay of your own? Write down your main claim in one clear and concise sentence, and then jot down your ideas for support.

Schools are already teaching to make the majority of students intelligent but they are not fulfilling the students’ greatest potential. There are already labs and trips which teach the students to gain the intelligence they need. If we were to increase the standards, then many unmotivated students would give up. So, they must separate the smart students from the not so smart students. Then, schools would be able to challenge the smart and not smart students at the students’ levels. We still don’t want to over teach the students because they still need to develop some social skills in school.

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