After having read the previous posts, I am afraid to admit that in comparison with the rest of you, I was a poor student. I have no trouble sympathizing with the two American students in the documentary and almost feel a kinship with them.
In the Simpsons, the jokes are always presented with a bit of truth behind them. There is a song in the Mary Poppins/Shary Bobbins episode where they sing (to the tune of "A Spoonful of Sugar"):
"If you cut every corner
It is really not so bad,
Everybody does it -
Even mom and dad
If nobody sees it,
Then nobody gets mad,
It's the American way"
If I was in the place of those two American students, I would be the same way. Why should I expend more effort if I already get good grades and can get into a good college? Why would I spend weekends studying when I could earn some money at a job and then earn a full ride scholarship for college? It seems like the fault is not on the heads of the students, but on the school system that allows them to coast through without challenging them.
While I agree that this attitude is not the most admirable, it seems to be human nature to try to do the least work possible to get by. Even the Chinese boy admits that he spends a chunk of his time at home playing computer games, and that he doesn't have to work as hard as his classmates to understand the concepts.
The Indian and Chinese students are presented as working hard with eventual monetary reward as motivation. Though the American girl may not become a doctor, I fully expect her to be successful in the future and earn a good living. Our economy seems to (at least for now) be structured in such a way that you don't have to excel in math and science in high school to enter a well-paid and highly respected profession.
The university system seems to do a decent job at weeding out the students that do not possess the necessary work ethic. The naturally gifted students that coast through high school are usually challenged by the higher standards in college. But in high school it seems like it is still very easy to get by without being fully challenged. We will never be able to change the system at large, but as teachers hopefully we can force our students to work hard by raising our standards and increasing our expectations.
1 comment:
I completely agree with you that human nature is to try to reap maximum benefit from minimum effort. Goodness knows I certainly did not spend every waking moment studying, either. In classes where I didn't have to work hard, I didn't.
I don't think the negative light in which the American students were portrayed was necessarily so much a reflection on them as individuals, but an indictment of our education system and, more broadly, our complacent culture.
I don't mean this in the context of a nature/nurture argument, but rather in the sense that the culture into which people are born drives so much about how they approach life: American kids are what American society has made them.
And one can fairly state, Indian kids are what Indian society has made them, etc.
My point is that I view the film more as commentary on American society than anything else.
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