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Shaun Scott Student Body President Editor's note: This article originally appeared in "adrenaline!," the official forum of the Shoreline Community College Student Government. The author welcomes questions and comments at adrenaline2003@hotmail.com, or stop in to meet your student government at Room 950 (in the PUB). Kevin Crouse, Junior at Shorewood High School, had decided with his family that enrolling at Shoreline Community College, to begin the Running Start program, would be a legitimate step. All things considered, Kevin had breezed through, above and beyond, Shorewood's educational standards laughingly easily. Shoreline Community College, as it turned out, was no more of a challenge to the 17 year old Crouse than 9th grade was two years prior. College, as with Shorewood, turned out to be no more than the exercise of feeding several professors the answers, to essay questions (Kevin was after all a history major), they wanted to hear. Admittedly, professors did ask for original thought, which was the practice of producing historical evidence/facts in order to support a novel/innovative thesis or theory. However, at Shorewood, Crouse had perfected the act of what teachers and professors know as Group Work; the act of letting 3 or 4 other students - normally of greater intelligence - decide upon an issue, while the usurper simply provides confirmation which supports the side that appears to be in the majority. Kevin Crouse learned little actual material, but he did learn to recite much. Crouse's academic tenure - academic in all aspects of the word - consisted of the fallacious facade of faking retention of information; the supposed smartness of his persona - an assumption held by many, based on his 3.73 GPA - was a figment of the imagination. Crouse's knowledge was merely knowledge of the system, and how to manipulate it to produce desirable effects -- grades, in this case. Kevin, quite bluntly, was not smart; but then again, smart - as Kevin should've learned from studying Aristotle in History 111 - is a relative term. While others knew more about what was being taught, Kevin knew more about appeasing the teacher. Kevin Crouse is simply a living embodiment of a major flaw of American education. Because so much emphasis is placed on a) competition among students, and b) letter grades, which are the seedbed of that competition, the effort of many students is placed not on learning the actual the material, but on the attainment of that letter grade itself. Ph.D. Cornel West once spoke, in a April 1999 lecture at the University of Washington entitled Race Matters, that 70% of all high school students admitted to cheating on tests and assignments regularly. Shorewood High School's Kolus - too - in 1999 revealed the issue of cheating students as well. Then again, students "getting over" or, at least, people in general attempting to get over, is not an entirely un-American phenomenon, for roguery is as American as apple-pie; to wit, Enron and corporate corruption, "legal" American robbery of Native American lands, and the role of money in just about every aspect of America's institutions, such as the military, academia, and politics (As Kevin also should've learned in History 111, this is no more than a modern take on Ancient Rome's Patron/Client phenomenon). At any rate, what is most distressing is the fact that this mentality has corrupted education itself; students are only interested in education inasmuch as it can help them make money; that is, education has disintegrated into a means to an end. The letter grade is the fetish of the pupil; the proverbial 4.0 a mere tool, and no longer an achievment inasmuch as it used to be; the professor - revered in many cultures as a possessor of knowledge - is brown-nosed, cajoled, beseeched, ostracized and manipulated throughout the course of the quarter, then promptly and conveniently discarded by most students who see no quantitative value in learning for learning's sake. Kevin Crouse cannot be blamed for not caring about his education, for education, in America - and in much of the world - is simply a device. © 2003 Shoreline Community College™ |
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