This essay will elaborate on the validity of Gerald Graff’s argument in his article “The Undemocratic Curriculum”, as well as outline how the argument could be improved. Graff’s article proposes that the education system in America is flawed in the sense that not all students are taught how to process or what to do with the information that they are exposed to. This puts them at a disadvantage to those student who have been taught adequate methods of expressing their ideas through argumentation. Oxford dictionary defines democracy as the practice or principles of social equality (1).
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So how can an education system claim to be democratic if not all students are all enlightened on the method of thinking required of them to be successful in their academic careers? Graff’s argument is strengthened by not only clearly defining his view on how undemocratic aspects of academic institutions in America are , but also explaining why this is the case and how it can be fixed. I agree with Gerald Graff’s perspective on how undemocratic education can be, and I agree with Graff’s proposed solution of encouraging academic argumentation, and educating students on how to compose a strong argument.
Incorporating argumentation skills into the curriculum will without a doubt benefit students by encouraging them to be independent thinkers, giving them the ability to express their own creative ideas, and support those using logic and reasoning. However incorporating argumentation skills into curricula alone is not all that can be done to make academic institutions more democratic. Gerald Graff’s paper presents a productive idea of using intellectual socialism as a way to make the education system in America more democratic.
His reasoning for this idea, as stated in his paper, is “the curriculum presents students with an extraordinary diversity of texts, ideas, subjects, intellectual perspectives, and approaches, but it fails to give them adequate help in assimilating this diversity. The one subject not offered in school is the one all the others presuppose, how to do school itself; the one thing the academic curriculum fails to cover is what it means to be academic”(1). This is a perfectly valid point teaching students how to do school itself and what it means to be an academic is something that is overlooked by many educational institutes.
Yet the solution proposed in The Undemocratic Curriculum does not address the problem as a whole. Without a doubt teaching students argumentation skills as a ways to encourage independent critical thinking could not only be beneficial for their own academic success but also for society as a whole, yet there is more that can be done to ensure education in america is more democratic. What Graff’s paper fails to address is the importance of teaching students how to strengthen their own learning skills. In order for an education system to progress towards social equality students should be given more guidance on learning methods.
A major part of education that is too often overlooked is simply learning how to improve learning skills. Most academic institutes expect students to already know how to process information as academic intellectuals using expert learning skills and critical thinking. Graff exentuates this point when he says “To a large degree, American education is organized for those who are already the best educated, a fact notoriously borne out in the college admissions process, where colleges compete for the top students and are rated by the percentage of these they attract.
It is almost as if the goal of college admissions were to recruit a student body that is already so good that it hardly needs a faculty to teach it”. By saying this Graff is pointing out how American education is flawed by not giving a chance to students who have the potential to be excellent scholar and basing their acceptance on students who already have mastered effective learning methods, work ethic and critical thinking. This quote implies that many schools in America do not offer their students adequate help to improve the way their methods of thinking and learning.
However incorporating argumentation skills into curricula will only aid students with critical thinking not guiding them to develop more efficient and effective learning skills. Exposing students to a variety of different learning strategies and giving them guidance on how to strengthen their own learning abilities will help them to reach their academic potential and is essential to creating a more democratic education system in america. Others may argue that achieving high grades is a matter of work ethic.
This argument implies that education today is in fact very democratic and that student receiving lower grades are either lazy or less intelligent. As a present student myself, I am able to recognize the degree to which this argument is invalid. It goes without saying that focus, determination and proper work ethic are fundamental to acheiving academic success , yet that is not to say that every student who maintains a proper work ethic is guaranteed academic success. Further, I have seen some of my peers spend dozens of hours slaving away in the library, only to receive mediocre to barely passing grades.
On the contrary I have seen students spend significantly lower amounts of time studying and receive outstandingly high grades. Do these observations conclude that those students with good work ethic receiving mediocre to low grades are of mediocre to low intelligence? Or do these observations reflect more on the learning methods and different approaches to learning these students with proper work ethic have taken? Can America honestly claim to have a democratic education system if not all students are given the proper tools to develop their learning skills to their fullest potential?
