Miss Saara Raassu
English 1113
September 3, 2012
Summary: Benjamin Barber’s The Educated Student Many would say that our current school system is flawed in many ways, one of which is the manner in which they get funding and quality of the information they are implanting into our children’s minds. There however is a way we can fix this, that is if we take on a movement of Interdependence, this means everyone has a sense of citizenship in their community and the world for that matter, do you agree with this? If you do than you would be able to relate to Benjamin Barber and the writing in his article, The Educated Student: Global Citizen or Global Conumer?, because he brings attention to these topics. At the beginning of his article Barber discusses how our founding fathers intended for all of our citizens to be well educated, “John Adams argued hard for schools for every young man…Thomas Jefferson made the same argument for public schooling for every potential citizen in America…” (Barber 416.3.2-3). He then proceeds to discuss how in present time there public school systems are being forced to run advertisements of companies in exchange for funding, because they are not funded enough without it; “We have watched this commercialization and privatization, a distortion of the education mission and its content, going to the heart of our schools themselves.” (Barber 417.11.1). Benjamin Barber puts great emphasis on the fact that we as a nation need to better understand citizenship and what it means to be a citizen, and on top of that be more aware of the other nations of this world and our relationship to them. We are a very multicultural nation, but he expresses how little we care about that and how we don’t understand that it gives us an advantage that we need to capitalize on. (421.28-29). Benjamin Barber has written many other articles and is still pushing the movement for Interdependence.
Work Cited
Barber, Benjamin R. "The