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. It’s 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 ways
to enhance our self esteem. As academics claim, the reason why education is perceived in this
poor way is that educationists these days don’t 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. That’s because education
covers almost all kinds of other fields; it deals with the way one may develop intelligence in
all 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.
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.