Today's American Scholar

We are still a society suffering from lack of mental challenge.

Yesterday I babysat for a nine year old boy. His mom asked me to make sure he did his boys scout assignment, which was read four pages about citizenship and find an article about local government. After he said he read the pages, I asked him simple questions from the sheet and he couldn’t answer them. He said the questions I asked, using direct words from the book were too confusing. He couldn’t even take information in and put it back out the same way he saw it on the page, which is the one thing we are holding on to as proof of our education system. Yes, we can ask plenty of questions as we saw in class today, but we can’t come up with supported, realistic answers. Also, we are able to ask questions because of our argumentative nature, not necessarily because we want to learn. No one asks questions in math, where they won’t get some public gain from it.

Those are just examples of kids in school, but this inability translate information into intelligent conversations exists throughout all American culture today. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, and elbow, but never a man.” We can’t come together and express ideas as a culture because we’re so focused on ourselves. If people were able to understand, sympathize and relate to others, no matter what how specified our careers and lives became, we could come back together and be ‘one man’. Though I doubt we will ever be able to come back to that.