To re-read this, I plan to do a lot of things differently. For starters, I am not going to be babysitting so I won’t have to stop reading every five minutes to check on anybody. This made it harder to read the text because it felt like I was taking hours to read 5 pages. Also, I will keep my phone away from me, that way I don’t have the urge to pick my phone up and scroll through instagram and facebook.
When giving this article another read, I made sure to pay more attention to details. I admit that when I read it the first time, I did a lot of skimming and a lot of the information went over my head. Upon reading for this second time, I learned that our educational system is Prussian in origin, specifically when he states, “We should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable learnership skills, and to endure docile and incomplete citizens.” When I read the article the first time, I skipped most of this part of the text where he brings up historical facts. Although I still believe he saids a mouthful in this article, he actually makes interesting points and it’s good to come across someone who has an unpopular opinion about education. I also learned that well-known successful people like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson weren’t products of a school system. And we honestly do hear that a lot where a lot of successful people didn’t attend college or even dropped out of school. But, I wouldn’t use this argument to prove his point. Readers can misinterpret this and think that education is unnecessary. Also, I learned that sometimes it’s good to take a step back and reread something that didn’t stick to you the first time. Maybe change the setting, your habits, attack the article in a different way and you’ll find you understand it way better.
