I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read

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of critical thinking, making it easy for the media to influence without having to answer any questions or face any scrutiny. As sad as the process of teaching seems to be, the thing that is even sadder is what it produces. “Doesn’t our epidemic dumbing-down have undeniable advantages for those institutions (the media, the advertising industry, the government) whose interests are better served by a population not trained to read too closely or ask too many questions?” English students spend most of their time being force fed “ gross oversimplifications.” There are times when they read books filled with the “aesthetic beauty” mentioned earlier, but at the same time they are told how to interpret these books by misinformed teachers who are doing more harm than good. These students are told what to think, and most of the time they are told to focus on moral messages that must apply to the worlds they live in. This destroys any value that one could gather from one of the “few remaining forms of entertainment not sustained by...the interests of advertising.” These students will then grow up despising any literature that is older than 50 and applies to something that their narrow minds can not quite reach. Even if they do encounter something valuable, they will strip it of any true meaning and only derive from it that which they were taught to derive. The bigger problem is that this process has created people who have no idea of how to deal with the “grey” and are instead much more comfortable with “sharply delineated black and white.” This is why they are incapable of crucial thinking or analysis. They have been presented clear cut information their entire lives and they have begun to think that anything that does not fall into this narrow spectrum is “elitist” and “unnecessary.” What results from these “educational methods” is a way of thinking (or not thinking to be more accurate) that equips these students for the “future”. This “future” consisting of of working at McDonald’s or being a corporate board member. “And so the roster of literary masterpieces we pass along to future generations will continue its downward shift, and those lightweight, mediocre high school favorites will continue to rise, unburdened by gravity, to the top of the list.”