Indolent and Unproductive Students

Posted: November 29th, 2013

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Indolent and Unproductive Students

 The writer argues that the students who are not willing to learn affect the students who value education. In his argument, he claims that it is useless trying to improve the performance of students in America at the particular time. As long as there are students who are not interested in learning, they will always affect the performance of the other students. He offers that maybe minors should be allowed to work, as the unproductive students are wasting time in school.

The writer avoids stating his views directly by using Rhetorical questions. He does this by using irony. In the case of the school dropouts, the writer points out that the institution should strive to keep the students in school. Moreover, he states that a school dropout earns more than he does. He tries to convince the reader that the dropouts should be forced to learn, as they could perform in a different sector. However, his argument in this case is not strong, as he only uses one case to support his argument. A research shows that cities that harbor many high school dropouts have low-income rates. His strengths in his arguments are that the rewarding of teachers, parents and students in order to improve the performance of students has failed. This is seen by money invested in this but produced no rewards. The government should find another strategy.

In his argument, Derbyshire states that unproductive students should be barred from school, but he does not give a solution or an alternative to school. He further states that maybe child labor should be appealed. The child labor helps to provide equal opportunities for education of all children and protect them from employment that would be unsafe for them. By prohibiting a child from education, we have not given them the opportunity to improve his performance and learn the little they can. However, he continues to state that barring the students from school would give them an opportunity to misbehave and enter into crime. Statistics show that 75 percent of crimes are committed by students who drop out of high school.

The writer points out that children over 12 years should be allowed to make their own decisions on whether they want to continue with school or not. Children at that age would be too young to make such concrete decisions. This is seen in the case of the person who own s the firm that repairs the writer’s roof. He says that after dropping out from high school, he realized he made a wrong decision and went for community schooling. Whatever kind of education he got, it has helped him in building an organization. While the writer is right, that rewards for good performance have not gotten any significant results, he is wrong by trying to point out that the low performing students should not be provided with education. He does not provide firm evidence, that the reason for the low performances of productive students is the students who are not serious with education. He also tries to point out that drop out students could actually earn better than the learned. Research shows that people that graduate from high school will earn $200,000 dollars more than dropouts will, where else, college graduates will earn $800,000 more than drop outs.

Statistics show that of the reasons why students drop out is because they felt adults were not interested in them. Teachers should treat performing students and non-performing students equally. This would motivate the none-performing and give them hope on improvement. Parents should also be engaged in their child’s life and education, in order to deal with any problems that the child would be experiencing. The solution is not to block the indolent students from education or to allow them into employment too early, while blocking education. The government should find a way to deal with this problem, so that education can be productive for all.

Work Cited

‘Crime Linked to Dropout Rates, Report Says.” School Library Journal. (2008): n.p. Web. 19 May 2012

Oct 28, 2009 4:21 PM “America’s Dropout Crisis.” The News Week. Daily Beast Company LLC, 28 Oct. 2009. Web 19 May 2012

“Youth and Labour.” United States Department of Labour. Web. 19 May 2012