Language Development Essay

Iman Soltani

Tera Ray

Language Development

08/13/2010

In his newspaper article “We Should Cherish Our Children’s Freedom to Think” author Kie Ho comments on the growing trend of people in the United States complaining about the quality of their educational system. Born and raised in Indonesia himself, Ho describes his own school experience as having been much different from what his son would eventually be provided with after migrating to America. Taking a look at the issue from this vantage point, Ho advises us to reconsider the characteristic virtue of US education, emphasizing strongly how it guarantees and even encourages and supports its students’ freedom, particularly the freedom of self-expression, which Ho considers to be the “most important measurement … in the studies of the quality of education in this century” (114). Although I would agree with Ho’s view to a certain extent, it remains nevertheless a subjective and oversimplified view on an otherwise complex issue. In the following I shall try to identify weak and inconclusive points in his argumentation.

Challenging those critics who are on a state of alert concerning the US education system, Ho initially couches his main counter-argument in a question: “If American education is so tragically inferior, why is it that this is still the country of innovation?” (113). While the question at first seems to be employed as part of a very effective strategy to establish a kind of premise on which the author can build his persuasive argument, it yet fails to have the desired rhetoric effect shortly after, as the following paragraph presents only a rather bland example to strengthen the overall argument. Trying to illustrate what he sees as the answer to the above-mentioned question, Ho recounts a personal experience “on an excursion to the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, where the work of schoolchildren was on exhibit.” (113)

This account is to give evidence of how a public school in the city of Laguna Beach, California, had provided its students “with opportunities and direction to fulfill their creativity” (113). However, not only is it a personal account of a single school’s way of doing things in one specific district – hence not possibly representative for the United States education system as a whole – but what makes the example even more inconclusive is that it does not say anything about the school’s specific curricular focus on creativity. In this sense, it would be not unusual for any school to have special art classes and projects, as this has always been a strong pillar of education in cultures all around the world. But apart from that, what exactly is the example supposed to say about an American school’s distinct curriculum when the works of those children were on exhibit in a museum – the very place where art is cultivated and preserved anyway? Even if the argument was to say that the US nourishes a well-developed exchange between the different educational and cultural institutions, it still would be a weak point made, since this is equally true for most European and Asian countries (at least I have personally experienced it both as a student and teacher in Germany, France, Portugal, and also the Netherlands, whose Dutch education system has left a strong influence in Indonesia due to its history of colonization).

Ho basically continues his line of argumentation by giving short examples of how American students are encouraged to express themselves freely, and how the differences in educational contents and methods may look like as opposed to non-American school systems that are said to attach importance more to their students’ “dedication and obedience” than to having them “experiment freely with ideas” (113). Again, he generalizes his son’s school experience and his own one, respectively, as being representative for one system in its entirety. For readers that are not familiar with the American education system, this view on things is more than misleading, since the Unites States, just like Germany, also belong to the few nations on earth with a rich diversity of school types and state-dependent control of education, which obviously will not have all schools follow one identical pattern.

In his closing argument Ho makes a very interesting point in saying that it would be difficult for “critics of American education” to understand the significance of freedom for education “because they are never deprived of it” (113). While this thought may be true for a majority of white Americans who have never had to face any form of repression in their own homeland, there will certainly be enough critics of the US education system who know very well what ‘freedom’ may mean – particularly parents of refugee families who may be concerned with their children being taught wrong notions of ‘freedom’ in American public schools. Furthermore, Ho also seems to ignore completely that he himself is in the position to reflect his own notion of ‘freedom’ only because he had experienced another system of education.