(Hi all. Please do me a favor and grade my SAT practice essay. Please do grade on a scale of 1-6, as the SAT graders do. Please do not hesitate to point out mistakes as well as advice on how I can improve my work. I have typed it verbatim, and I have noticed several mistakes myself as I typed. )
SAT October 2014 :
Prompt 1 :
Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
Some politicians and educators advocate teaching values and character in schools. They claim that children need guidance to develop honesty, kindness, and trustworthiness and that schools should consider it their responsibility to foster these qualities just as they aim to foster academic skills. But good character simply cannot be taught in classrooms and through textbooks. Attempts to make values part of the curriculum will only take time and resources away from important academic subjects.
Assignment: Is it wrong to try to teach values and character in the classroom? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
Essay:
A wide range of policy maker, thinkers and even common people believe that it is critical to instruct children in schools ethically. For sure, it’s the best opportunity to shape youth’s mentalities and frame their ideas and perspectives and that’s the most dangerous aspect of the process. Because children are easily manipulated, I firmly oppose the idea of teaching values and morals at school.
During the rise of Nazi ideology in the early 1930s, Hitler who freshly took over the power of the Third Reich in Germany started a deep and a radical reform in educational system to incorporate Nazis values. In fact children, nicknamed “Hitler Youth”, began to absorb the bigot ideas of rejecting Jews, supporting the Final Solution theory – The act of exterminating all central Europe Jews- and endorsing the idea of Lebensraum (Vital Space). To the perspective of Hitler, these extremist and anti-Semitic ideas are the sound values that a young German kid should learn. In this way, he raised a generation of brainwashed people who support blindly his bloody policies, do not question and remain stubbornly loyal to him. This education was commonplace in Germany from 1933 to 1945 which explain why there’re so many mentally-distorted people due to this teaching. If Hitler didn’t start this system of teaching values, German’s mindset could be different and may be liberal and it will be no exaggeration if we say that they would oppose the war.
Similarly, The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra depicts the image of a society that is “programmed” by extremist Group Taliban and its fundamentalist agents. In fact, Taliban’s wrapped view of ethics, morals and proper behavior made them believe that a woman is a stigma that should be hidden behind a dark burqa and that violence is the only way to establish justice. All these toxic ideas and more are transmitted to children through education. Kids in the story gained a distorted view of the world. At this point, one can understand the continuous decline in Afghanistan and why this country, that was then prosperous, drowned in a bloodbath.
To go farther in analysis, we can point to Europe in the Middle Age where education was strictly based on Biblical teachings via Catholic Church. This regulation suggests that kids must accept bias, false assumption and misconceptions of the Bible to be “ethical”, which is not true. Bright thinkers and scientists helped to enlighten Europe when they managed to destroy the idols of ethics and morals imposed by the Church. They were able to think freely and productively when they took off the chains of codes learned in schools of Holy Roman Empire and Hapsburg Empire. Clearly, school mustn’t impose codes because they are oppressive, stifle creativity and veil truths.
A careful analysis of modern European history as well as literature emphasizes the fact that it is pointless and sometimes even disastrous to try to teach morals.