Dear President,

I would like to speak for the People, not each and every individual, but the collective mind that should make up our country. Our country used to be the pinnacle of hard work and Westernization, and now it is looked down to by many of our neighbours as a joke. How did we end up like this? How is it that the too leading candidates of the 2016 election are the most rude, twisted, big-headed politicians to ever walk this earth? According to research done by Iposos MORI, the United States ranked second most ignorant country in terms of awareness of political and social statistics. We are also fourteenth in our “cognitive skills and educational attainment”, according to Pearson. The American people are so ignorant and easily taken advantage of by the media and biases that we allowed two equally ignorant imbeciles as the primary candidates for this election. One way that we could improve the position of the United States (and filling it with more intellectual individuals) is by fine-tuning our public education system.

What concerns me the most about our public education system is our focus on objective-based learning and our incapability of putting our education in the hands of the county and not the state. Because our system is focused on making a student an upstanding working-class citizen and not an intellectual we are bringing forth people who lack the ability to ask why. And not just ask why, but to ask why with a purpose, the purpose of creating friction and thought in others. I am a student at Clarkston High School in Clarkston, Michigan and I am part of a program called International Baccalaureate. The IB program was made after Marie-Thérèse Maurette, a French educator who worked in Geneva at the Geneva International School, who had wrote an original pedagogy for peace titled, Educational Techniques for peace. Do they exist?, in which she emphasizes the importance of educating students so that they become members of the human race and not members of a nation. Maurette states,

“The common people are the audience before which the drama of human destiny is acted. They view the play by means of press, cinema, and radio. They criticize it, and therefore the leading actors must keep an eye on their audience”.

What she means by this is, the People are manipulated by “actors” into watching a “play” that was created to please them. People of power mold themselves to be appealing to the audience they are attempting to control. And the People are ignorant enough to let this continue. In the program the students are introduced to Theory of Knowledge, in which the students are tasked with asking themselves “How they know”. This enables students the ability to recognize the need to act responsibly in an increasingly interconnected but uncertain world. We are forced to ask why and to look at different perspectives and, not necessarily avoid a bias, but, gain an understanding of what we are attempting to argue. Essentially becoming less ignorant and arrogant. If we were to create a nationwide public education system, that was instituted by the government of the country and not influenced by the bias of the state, that mirrored the beliefs of Maurette and the IB program we could move towards becoming a more educated and peaceful nation.

Many thanks,

Emerson Stuver