Hank Hasemeier

Mrs. Bowyer

Expository Reading and Writing

March 25, 2017

Adapting the World to the People

not the People to the World

The world is a very unforgiving place. It caters to a certain category of person often

pushing that category to the top at the expense of everyone else. If a person cannot play the

system to their advantage then they are left behind in the dust, only serving as a stepping stone

that others may use to get to the top. In some aspects of life this is acceptable, competition

drives innovation. In other aspects of life, however it is the largest blockade that the human race

has faced in hundreds of years. Public schooling is one of those areas where the world has

failed to adapt to the needs of children to produce an outcome that is ideal for the majority of

students. This is just one case, there are many places where social structures fail to support the

needs of the human race, two others being gender and race. Women are typically viewed to be

less powerful and influential than men, and blacks are typically viewed as violent and primal.

The public school system is in desperate need of reform. Currently the system is more

built around the ability to follow instructions and do what authority tells you to do and has little to

nothing to with a students skill and understanding of a certain topic. Think of a situation where a

student very clearly excels in math but tends to lack any skill in history. That student will soon be

staring at a report card that has a big fat F in the history category, and because of that he may

be held back therefore bringing his education in math to a screeching halt until he can pass

history and move on to the next grade. This student's education is being slowed to an almost

complete stop because he does not fall into the category of students who are able to conform to

the system and be at least average in every category, when in a real world application that

student would most likely progress further than the rest because he would pick a career related
to his interests like a stockbroker or a statistician. This is only one example of the many ways

that the public school system is hindering students in the progression of their natural skills. To fix

this the system needs to be changed, a lot. Instead of trying to force students to comply with the

system we need to cater to their natural skills. Instead of trying to create students who will be

average in all categories to open doors we need to let students be who they want to be. If a

student displays Skills and interest in math at a young age let them progress on a path that

allows him to follow that path to success. Make classes such as physics or engineering

available while dropping the requirements for classes like spanish or government. David Brooks

worded it very well in his article Honor Code when he says Schools have to engage people as

the are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers

who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who

honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that

teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs

that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp. (Brooks). He is trying to

say that we need to be able to cater to the individual skills of students and instead of teaching

them all one way to live in this world, teach them how to fit into society by building on their own

skills and adapting small things about themselves to become successful in their own lives, not

adapting their entire lifestyle to fit into the social norms of what their parents and grandparents

thought of as successful.

A second area where the social structure of America fails to support the people is

Gender. Women are typically viewed to be weaker than men, and not just physically. In Deborah

Tannens article His politeness is Her Powerlessness she states ... by experts as well as non

experts, by which women's ways of talking, uttered in a spirit of rapport, are branded as

powerless.(Tannen) She is making a point of the fact that womens words are heard less than

mens words, and while this may be a highly debated topic there could be some truth to it. Most

of the time men are viewed as the smarted of the two genders. This is because men go out and
work and bring in most of the income for a family. As a result of this men make up a larger

portion of the workforce than women and are in more control of the money so they also make

more of the financial decisions. This leaves women at home to take care of the family and the

house. While this doesnt actually make men any smarter or better than women typically it gives

his word more weight than hers. Think about it from a different point of view. A doctor tells you

that you have a cold, and your coworker from the university tells you that your symptoms point

more towards cancer. Who are you going to believe? Thats right, the doctor. Not because the

doctor is any better or smarter than your co worker just because the doctor has experience in

the medical field. The same thing applies to men and women. Since men typically make more of

the large life decisions mens words tend to carry more weight in most aspects of life. Now on

the other hand if ask a man and a woman how to care for a child the womans word is going to

have more weight simply because women are much better at loving and raising children.There

is no easy way to fix the problem of women being viewed as less than men. The only way to

change this ideology is to constantly remind people that men and women are different, not

unequal.

Word count: 1048

Works Cited