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Mohamed Naiem, ENGL 213 / B

rough draft of the essay 01

not corrected,

still missing : quotations are to be correctly done, works cited section is to add, two

passages are to paraphrase, a last summarising paragraph to write. Its really rough

then.

In the The Educationist as Painkiller, Postman argues that educationists should stop trying to

make students highly intelligent, and they should start to serve as painkillers to the sickness

of stupidity if they want to be respected and effective in their tasks.

In a first part of his essay, Postman noticed, academics show disrespect for educationists,

which sounds odd since the most influential and renowned philosopher in history were

educationists too. Plato, Rousseau, Lock, and others discussed extensively how learning

occurs and which methods are helpful to achieve it. Also many great thinkers of the

contemporary time, such as Karl Popper or Ludwig Wittgenstein, were teachers and

educationists. Why then, in USA, is this disrespect of the subject of education so omnipresent

that students avoid to study in the education field?. One may say that studying in other

subjects enables student to get financially rewarding jobs, yet this is not the case for many

other subjects widely chosen by students. Answering that question rather comes to find waysto enhance our self esteem. As academics claim, the reason why education is perceived in this

poor way is that educationists these days dont have solid knowledge of the work of great

philosophers, such as Plato, Rousseau, and Lock. However not all professors in other subject

matters are knowledgeable about the work of the prominent thinkers in their own fields. In

fact educationists, like other scientists, show certain ignorance about the core of the subject

they are in, yet only educationists ignorance is easily spotted. Thats because education

covers almost all kinds of other fields; it deals with the way one may develop intelligence inall many other fields. So for educationists, to be knowledgeable, they should be of an

unconventional wisdom. Thus, educationists should not unrealistically claim having absolute

knowledge of intelligence and ways to gain it. Intelligence is far too vast to be understood

only by education specialists. To make a medical analogy, physicians work on healing the

sick, not on making people reach the perfect health conditions. Similarly, teachers should

focus on helping children not be stupid, making them brilliantly intelligent. They, in short,

should work like stupidity painkillers. For this purpose, many specialists studied stupidity

and concluded that it is a behaviour (mostly talks) that we can change and fix, not a state.

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Therefore, the curricula should focus on recognizing stupidity to protect student from it.

Postman has identified some of its forms.

I do not claim to have been entirely successful, but I have been able to isolate

thirty-two varieties of stupid talk. These include some of the more obvious

forms, such as either-or thinking; overgeneralization; inability to distinguish

between facts and inferences; and reification, a disturbingly prevalent

tendency to confuse words with things. (paragraph 16)

Then in a second part, the writer discusses some forms of balderdash, a word he prefers to use

instead of stupidity to make it less embarrassing for educationists study stupidity. First, he

explains how pomposity, which consists of somewhat talking arrogantly, may make student

act in a careless way. Second, he pints out that euphemism, an excessive politeness, may be a

misleading way to cover wrongness.

President Nixon . . . chose to say that members of his campaign organization were guilty of an

excess of zeal. This was the first time to my knowledge that the word zeal has been used as

a euphemism for illegal entry, stealing, bribery. (from paragraph 21)

Euphemism then should not be tolerated or taught in order not to normalize dishonest

practices. Third he adds that another widely held practice is the usage of the word they to

refer to a presumed doer of an action, which makes individuals less responsible of what

happens to them. Fourth, he notices that superstitions, which consist of believing that some

groups are better than others by nature, or that a tendency to study literature can make

students angels on earth. In this specific matter, Postman asserts

men with Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences working for the Pentagon,

have been responsible for killing more people in any given week than the Mafia has

managed since its inception.(paragraph 27)

Finally, Postman claims that slogans, which are intended to prompt solidarity, may also

convey the message that only certain groups deserve more attention and care than the rest of

people.