Critical thinking concepts and applications

Rereading America

Critical Thinking Questions Based on "Rereading America"

Michael Moore's uniquely facetious style of political commentary is on great display in his "Idiot Nation" essay. Inflammatory rhetoric aside, it is not so much Moore's intention to argue that we are a nation of unintelligent people so much as that we are gutting our educational standards to the risk of our collective intelligence. In other words, his essay is more directly about the failure from the top down to provide the proper economic and political support for our schools, our teachers and our students. This is depriving us of the educational quality enjoyed in more progressive nations.

Though Moore's argument is limited by his decidedly one-dimensional political orientation, I find myself in strong agreement with his basic premise. That is, if we fail to provide the proper material and philosophical backing for our schools, we will intend hand America's future over to a nation of idiots.

In his essay, "Against School," Gatto argues that school is boring and childish. I regret to say that this observation conforms with many of my educational experiences. This was especially true of my time spent in Iran during my elementary and secondary schooling. Much of our curriculum was defined by rigid state standards that had more to do with compliance with the Koran than with the value of that which we learned. In particular, we were forced to learn in Arabic instead of a more international language because this was the language used for the Moslem holy book. This was boring by virtue of being useless, but even more frustrating was the government's childish insistence on teaching the Iranian government's distorted version of historical events. Many of us possessed enough knowledge even as teenagers, to recognize as childish and irrelevant the highly manipulated texts that they fed us in school. To this extent, Gatto's assessment of schools strikes me as accurate, even if my experiences were far away from America's classrooms.

3: For Ken Harvey, who finds himself on the Vocational Education track with eventual essayist Mike Rose, high school is a series of pressures and challenges which are magnified by the expectations of self and others. For Harvey, the assertion that he just wants to be average is designed to insulate him from the various social constructs that contextualize one's education. Beyond the mere challenges of learning and being enriched, those confined within the parameters of a highly standardized education are also likely to feel that their individualism, creativity and energy are more liability than benefit.

Ken Harvey chose to cope with this feeling of confinement by resisting the demand to be anything more than educated in the field of his choice. To an extent, Harvey's desire to be average was tantamount to the desire to learn freely without succumbing to the broader cultural implications of one's attained level of educational intelligence.