Friday, May 14, 2010

Reasoning Back to Premises

“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”
Group #5 Premise
Cai, Christian, Hannah, and Ellie


We gather that what Professor X is saying is that basically students are, for the most part, uninterested in the education that is required for vocational training. Also those students are being placed incorrectly in classes and therefore are being far too challenged to perform well. It is not that the students aren’t trying to perform well, but rather that they are confused about what is required of them. We believe that he could be arguing that college may not be for everyone. This may be due in part to the structure of the classes. In biology, for example, you are evaluated on a “what is right and wrong” standard such as multiple answer questions. On the other hand an English class must grade you a bit differently because we all write uniquely and someone must be the judge of our prose. This is a pressure for teachers because they must qualify the value of your writing and this can be a burden for them. Students are required to take English courses 101 as well as 102, and not always because they want to. In fact you could be attending college in order to become a police officer, but you still have to take these required courses. Many students are so pressured in college that they simply boil over. Professor X writes, “The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty.” Basically what Professor X is saying is that we are surrounded by difficulties pressured by societal optimism. These pressures do not allow us to properly achieve our goals for our lives in the future. Professor X assumes that most people are in school because they are tied to it economically. If they did not have to strive to get ahead in this world and in our society they would much rather spend their time, and their money doing something else. But since our society does not allow us the freedom to do as we desire we must go on with our day to day lives of educating ourselves in order to be a step ahead of the ones that are walking behind us.

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