I just want to say that I do not generally watch any type of television programming whilst here on my college campus for the channels are usually preset up to some type of sports channel that I don't find too terribly interesting. However, on this particular day, I found News9 broadcasting and decided to update myself with certain hot topics going on around the USA. This was when they broadcasted this:
Detroit High School Protest: Students Suspended After Demanding 'An Education'*
*this is linked to the original Huffington Post article which News9 linked to.
I will not bore anyone with just a huge synopsis of the article, so read if you wish to follow up with the next. And as the person I am, before voicing out my own personally biased views, I ended up reading some of the comments first before plotting out this obviously organised blog post.
I sort of shake my head in disapproval in some of these views that some people still hold, no matter how outdated/overrated/obnoxious they are (hey, three Os. Perhaps I should adopt 'triple O' for those three adjectives alone), but nonetheless, i could not completely say that any of those views was completely incorrect.
I should also probably mention that I am forming each of these opinions all on my own after reading the article solely. I have no personal experience with this type of situation and looking at the pictures on that post alone, so if my views seem more biased towards one side and does not take the other to full consideration, I apologise in advance.
Okay, so after having read a few portions of the article, I found myself questioning certain things from a possible philosophical perspective, the type of view point that seems to plague our system even more by making things much more complex than how we originally thought them to be.
I believe (whether in the comments, News9, or somewhere else) that I had read that they regarded the education they were receiving as sub-par. Here's the problem with this. Who defines what education is up to par? What is par in the first place?
I’m fortunate enough to have attended an International Baccalaureate (IB) programmed schooling in which, no matter how much I complained about all the workload and the daftness of some of the teacher’s styles of lecturing, am thankful for every second I spent there and admire how much they work for as little pay they get for doing their job. That is what I call dedication.
The point of mentioning that small aside is this. When one says par, it creates a threshold, a minimum in which everyone below or sub-par gives a negative connotation, and everything above just vice-versa. However, it depends on where par actually is until those assumptions can be made. I went to this IB school, and frankly, I regard that type of schooling in which nearly all my classes were honours, at or above the AP standard, as my par. It’s my biased view in which when I see another school in a less fortunate setting, I find it below par, even if that school was still a pretty good school as well. I ended up getting out of 22-course hours before even coming in as a freshman, and I felt that perhaps I could have gotten more. To me, my performance was sub-par. I don’t have that viewpoint in which I can mention for the rest of the country’s standards where par is on this educational scale, but then again, what person does? Not even going into international statistics, our education levels right here in the US change dramatically just moving from region to region, and par-level education is viewed differently in each. So while I may agree with the major view that this school is substantially enough below this par-level that we needn’t fuss too much about that aspect of it. The problem lies with what happens next. Were the school to actually improve just to attempt to match up to par-level education, it is then we must consider where par is.
The other problem that sort of stems from this is the fact that this current generation’s intellectual scale is so broad. Those that don’t want to learn will laze around as always, but those that find so many things fascinating have access to so much more information because of our technological advances. This becomes problematic when trying to set this par.
If we were to take a very oversimplified example, we can make a small model of a scale. Not to say that people back then were not intelligent or anything, but our generation is just so much more intelligent for their age (and certain studies have hinted that as a balance to this, they also stay in their adolescent stage for a significantly longer period of time, but I digress). Back then, we can label the genii (geniuses) as being rated 5 in intellect, 0 for those that do not wish to learn. If par were labelled as the average or midpoint in between the two, this would be 2.5. However, let’s say this generation’s mental capacity would be up to 10 for genii, and those that are academically apathetic still being at 0. That would mean our par would then be 5, and you can see that our par for standards has basically doubled. Perhaps this is the reason why some schools’ standards have changed and have risen to a slightly higher level, and it's becoming harder for those that have been labeled as sub-par to catch up.
Another thing that I want to mention would be my uneasiness with some of these actions taken.
Firstly, I want to also mention that though I may be analytically discouraging throughout this entire post, I do find this type of action done by these students to be rather admirable. However, perhaps actually marching out of the classroom to go through with this protest may not have been the best decision for that becomes a little bit contradictory on their part. To me, perhaps it was just how the article had phrased that gave me this impression, but, marching out of the school and ditching class in order to protest because of lacking education was not the most brilliant move. Maybe a more media-appealing one (since that seems to have been their goal), but not the brightest.
The suspension seems rather incorrectly justified. Sure, had the students been skipping too many classes and such, perhaps some merit would be given on their side, but if the suspension had been given solely because of the fact of the protest, then that seems like daftness overkill. Is this some form of academic misconduct that I’m unaware of? Why should the students have to pay for their lack of education when they’re really striving to learn? But of course, as I mentioned before, unless these kids have also been technologically deprived (and god forbid if they couldn’t find a nearby library), they could always learn by other means.
I do want to mention a rather daft ideology that most people have adopted, and I don’t know why it’s turned this way. A couple of years back, within the pre-2000 era, when a student wasn’t doing well, he would be scolded for his laziness and lack of effort. Now, it seems as though the teachers are being reprimanded more by the parents because of their children’s lack of knowledge. I don’t mean to back up those teachers mentioned within the article for 68 days of absence, and to such extents that large groups had to be formed to keep an eye on the students, is totally unacceptable. However, this ideology that the teacher is like an all-knowing being and that it must be the teachers fault isn’t learning anything is completely incorrect. If anything, I would say that if the child is not learning, it’s either that the child apathy level has risen to such a high extent, or the teacher fails to encourage the child to want to learn.
That’s honestly all there is to it. Unless the child has a serious learning disability, if the child has the desire to learn, they will learn. If they don’t, they won’t.
I do believe in the 50-50 split of efforts though. Obviously, it cannot be the student’s fault entirely, but it also works the other way. The teacher is only responsible for half of that responsibility to learn, you must meet them half way, but once again, where is this half way point in which you must meet? It’s become the same as how we define par.
Now it seems as though I’ve digressed into my own personal rant and not to much focus on the article itself, and perhaps that’s why I decided to write this post anyway. Perhaps the message I was trying to convey turned out to be rather useless after all, just restating the problem and never providing any solutions. I would like to say, however, that regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the possibility that this was another publicity stunt (though I highly doubt this), I do find it admirable that they would go to such extents for their own education.
And I’ll leave the rant about defining education (and what it means to be educated) for a later time.
