GRE Model Essay 39. "It is primarily through formal education that a culture tries to perpetuate the ideas it favors and discredit the ideas it fears"
The speaker asserts that a culture perpetuates the ideas it favors while discrediting those it fears primarily through formal education. I agree that grade-school, and even high-school, education involves cultural indoctrination. Otherwise, I think the speaker misunderstands the role of higher education, and overlooks other means by which a culture achieves these ends.
I agree with the speaker with respect to formal grade-school and even high-school education--which to some extent amount to indoctrination with the values, ideas, and principles of mainstream society. In my observation, young students are not taught to question authority, to take issue with what they are taught, or to think critically for themselves. Yet, this indoctrination is actually desirable to an extent. Sole emphasis on rote learning of facts and figures is entirely appropriate for grade-school children, who have not yet gained the intellectual capacity and real-world experience to move up to higher, more complex levels of thinking. Nevertheless, the degree to which our grade schools and high schools emphasize indoctrination should not be overstated. After all, cultural mores, values, and biases have little to do with education in the natural sciences, mathematics, and specific language skills such as reading and writing.
Although the speaker's assertion has some merit when it comes to the education of young people, I find it erroneous when it comes to higher education. The mission of our colleges and universities is to afford students cultural perspective and a capacity for understanding opposing viewpoints, and to encourage and nurture the skills of critical analysis and skepticism--not to indoctrinate students with certain ideas while quashing others. Admittedly, colleges and universities are bureaucracies and therefore not immune to political influence over what is taught and what is not. Thus to some extent a college's curriculum is vulnerable to wealthy and otherwise influential benefactors, trustees, and government agencies who by advancing the prevailing cultural agenda serve to diminish a college's effectiveness in carrying out its true mission. Yet, my intuition is that that such influences are minor ones, especially in public university systems.
The speaker's assertion is also problematic in that it ignores two significant other means by which our culture perpetuates ideas it favors and discredits ideas it fears. One such means is our system of laws, by which legislators and jurists formulate and then impose so-called "public policy." Legislation and judicial decisions carry the weight of law and the threat of punishment for those who deviate from that law. As a result, they are highly effective means of forcing on us official notions of what is good for society and for quashing ideas that are deemed threatening to the social fabric, and to the safety and security of the government and the governed. A second such means is the mainstream media. By mirroring the culture's prevailing ideas and values, broadcast and print media serve to perpetuate them. It is important to distinguish here between mainstream media-such as broadcast television—and alternative media such as documentary films and non-commercial websites, whose typical aims are to call into question the status quo, expose the hypocrisy and unfair bias behind mainstream ideas, and bring to light ideas that the powers-that-be most fear. Yet, the influence of alternative media pales in comparison to that of mainstream media.
In sum, the speaker's assertion is not without merit when it comes to the role of grade schools and high schools. However, the speaker over-generalizes about what students are taught--especially at colleges and universities. Moreover, the speaker's assertion ignores other effective ways in which mainstream culture perpetuates its agenda.
