Fated to sit on the sidelines
May 6, 2008
I’m not an idiot, but for some reason ever since I arrived college I’ve had a hard time proving that.
I fancied myself a Max-Fischer-with-a-solid-GPA type in high school, but MU didn’t seem to care I founded the film club or served as editor of my school paper. Instead they handed me a rejection letter from the Honors College and kicked me to the pre-journalism curb, where here I still sit, because I didn’t have the right standardized number.
To add to this punishment, I must endure countless experiences with MU’s most apathetic cruising on past me in the fast lane to success, splashing mud in my face while I sit there.
I thought it was just me: sentenced to this academic purgatory, never to be recognized for any effort I expelled from the depths of my soul, but I’ve been assured by many intelligent people, they bear the same fate.
What do I mean by MU’s most apathetic? Students who go beyond my abundance of empathy and kill any notion I have of justice in this world. It may sound harsh, but I feel I must speak for us forgotten ones, the students who didn’t get the magic number.
For instance there is a guy in nearly all my classes, and in an intermediate Spanish class will say crap like “Quay es el-ah” and asks what secular means in journalism class.
He looks and acts like a hunk of pot roast, yet this kid was a Walter Williams Scholar, a reward for doing well on standardized testing. It causes me to weep that it’s entirely possible I will have to watch this guy on the evening news while I practice for my advanced balloon animal test at clown college.
Then there’s the girl who my entire journalism class saw on video give a response that makes one shudder. Upon being asked on campus why our country is in the war in Iraq she responded, “Like uhhh, I don’t know. Because of what happened on September 9?”
I couldn’t make this stuff up.
So why do some students who read books — gasp — not assigned for class, and obtain the capacity to care about things beyond their Friday night plans, seem to get the shaft?
Why does the fact that these worries keep me up at night seem not enough to prove I deserve a little more credit?
Because our education system is broken from top to bottom, preschool to university. Our system rewards students for having certain numbers rather than a personality or a drive to help people and solve problems.
When the SAT doesn’t stand for anything anymore, on top of “distorting education priorities and practices” and having “a devastating impact on the aspirations of young students,” according to Richard C. Atkinson, the former president of the University of California, isn’t it time to reevaluate how students get into college?
I’m not saying kids such as Pot Roast and September 9 shouldn’t go to college. I’m saying I wish a sense of empathy about the world and knowledge had been instilled in them at an early age. But for this to occur in early education we would have to drastically cut the number of students in this country or stop promoting the notion that making money and having a career in service is an ultimatum. Sadly the plausible option seems elusive to many.
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