Critical Response
In Mary Sherry’s essay In Praise of the F Word she describes how she feels that students are being cheated by schools, not learning material and being passed on. She calls the diplomas that some kids get meaningless and also goes as far to say that these graduates are semiliterate. Sherry’s solution to the problem as she sees it is to use flunking students as a general policy, or at least threatening to flunk them to motivate them. She feels that the students who make it to educational- repair shops or adult-literacy programs are fortunate. It is here in these educational repair shops that Sherry states these students discover that they have been cheated by the educational system. I do not think that Sherry is fair in making these statements. She did not present enough evidence to me to get me to buy into her arguments.
There are several concerns with this essay that make her views unacceptable. My first problem with this Essay is that Sherry teaches an adult-literacy program. From that viewpoint she does have some firsthand knowledge about the population of people in need of basic grammar and writing skills, but it also makes her bias. She states that “Tens of Thousands of eighteen-year-olds will graduate this year and be handed meaningless diplomas.” This statement raises many questions for me and Sherry was not effective in convincing me of her views expressed. I feel like this statement was made to make her point seem more reasonable. I would like to know what percentage overall is that number. I do not feel like she took into consideration that many of these students may have learning and or developmental disabilities. How many of these students needed extra help and the schools in their district lacked the resources to appropriately help them? Were these tens of thousands of students really cheated or did the teachers and schools do the best they could to teach these students with the resources they had. Teachers are...