|
|
|
The Newsletter >
An Open Letter to Professor Korihor
July 7, 2009
Dear Professor,
I go to school with the students who are the result of your educational philosophy through the years. I sit beside them and listen as they repeat the ideas and concepts you and your colleagues have indoctrinated them with, and I confess myself in mourning for the death of education in this country.
It is difficult, if not impossible to sustain a decent debate in most college classrooms—debate having been sacrificed in favor of the much less interesting or definitive concept of “dialogue.” The result of which is that we talk endlessly and say nothing, or as one young man put it, “I rub BS on you and then you rub BS on me, and then we compliment each other about all smelling of stinking BS.”
Professor Korihor, I have watched with interest over the years as you and yours have attempted to persuade your students that the belief in a happy, lucky lightning strike in a puddle of perfectly mixed mud requires less of a leap of faith than the belief in what the Greek’s called, “The Unmoved Mover.” Many of your students choose mud, not because it requires less of a leap of faith, but because mud has no behavioral standards.
I watch and listen as their minds are opened and their hearts are emptied. You take but you do not give. They cheat. They lie. They have sex with people they do not like and do not care about, and then every single semester they are asked not to plagiarize—or else. Or else what, the mud’s going to be mad? You stripped the Ten Commandments out of their heads long ago and gave them nothing but mud.
You have created a generation of students who say, “Catch me if you can.” You turn their world from black and white (an ignorant childish belief system you assure them) to a lovely fog of gray, and then you tell them not to cheat. They are cheating—a lot, because one student’s sin is another student’s desperate need in a choking fog of relative values. Congratulations. It’s cheating anarchy.
In addition, only those who experience the educational concept of “group work” can fully appreciate how low the standard has fallen for what passes as education in the American system today. Group work means that the teacher can catch up on her paperwork or email, while the “groups” hash out some assigned task. One person will have a realistic workable idea, two people will do all the work, one person will rebel in the middle of the project, and most will either forget their “part” or simply not show up—everyone will want an ‘A.” Welcome to the socialistic mindset. Every group member equal to every other group member, but they never are—ever. It is cheating at the group level.
Professor Korihor, in the end, I believe that all this slaying of archaic dragons (religion, tradition, conservatism, 6,000 years of precedent) is really about one thing—money. It always is. That part you got right.
Since I was in third grade, my teachers and professors have been telling me that they should get paid more—more than professional athletes or corporate greed mongers or anybody, because teachers teach the doctors, lawyers, and corporate greed mongers how to do group work. In a perfect socialistic world, teachers might finally get a bigger slice of the greed pie they’ve been hoping for all these years, and this doesn’t make them greedy, it makes them self-serving.
Professor, know that I will struggle on, bringing true diversity to my college campus and something else—a cogent, articulate, and passionate condemnation of why plagiarism is a filthy habit, practiced by intellectual baboons.
Sincerely,
Linda (Student Eternal) Zern
PS To the teachers who helped me learn to read and type--thank you. I couldn't have done it without you, and to the handful of teachers who really tried to earn their paycheck--thank you. To the high school biology teacher who showed movies for an entire semester and whose class was called Cinema Two, I say, "You should have been fired."
|
|
