Kecoughtan High School

Hampton, Virgina

Teacher: Emma Flood

 

 

 

The Role Of Personal Responsibility in Improving the Quality Of Life in Our Communities Today

By Justin Oliverio

 

The only person an individual can control is himself, so it is every person’s obligation to not only himself, but his community, to participate and correct the injustices which arise during the course of citizenship. However, when an individual participates in the government by voicing his opinion and desires, but is still ignored, the government must then take the responsibility to correct these injustices, because it is no longer acting with the consent of the people. When regulations are created in a community, the officials and politicians in charge should take the responsibility to collect the necessary information from not only their expensive political reports and the lobbyists, but the people who live normal lives everyday and are most in touch with what is going on in the community.

 

Contrary to what they would like the voters to think, the politicians do not live in the “real world”, instead they live up on a hill far away from the problems that face the common citizen and their goal is only to get elected and reelected year after year. The issues that are often debated in Congress have been conjured by the career politicians because they have been told by an over-priced poll that this is what the people want; but instead of leaving their comfortable chairs, politicians accept what has been hand fed to them by a lobbyist and take it as fact. For proof of this sad state of affairs, one needs to look no farther that the public school system.

 

Like the Barnum & Bailey Circus, education has become a spectacle. If a parent were to walk into the library of the local high school, she would surely be stunned by the barrage of technology that awaits her. There are pretty, colorful computers, VCRs, and even televisions that televise CNN around the clock. And the technology doesn’t stop in the library. Take a stroll into one of the classes. It would be hard to miss another twenty-seven inch television that faces you as you enter this room (and every other one in the building) or the teacher’s personal computer and what would a visit to the classroom be without seeing a one-hundred dollar telephone? The useful technology doesn’t stop there either! Should you choose to have an elegant, twenty-five minute lunch in the over-crowded cafeteria, what would you expect to find, not good food, but two more televisions! Couple that with the security cameras lining the halls (which are used to suspend people who take a drink they have just brought out of the cafeteria during lunch) and any intelligent person would realize that schools have every thing they need to provide students with the best education money can buy, right? Wrong! The schools have spent so much money on making the school look smart that they forgot that the students are the ones who need to be smart. There are geography classes that don’t have maps and art classes without paper, but not to worry—the cafeteria has two brand new TVs! Not only that, there are English classes that don’t have enough English books, but more importantly, four students were caught eating in the hall during lunch today, and they have [been] expelled.

 

It seems that any idiot would be able to see that something is drastically wrong with this picture. However the paradox is that the idiots that don’t see what is wrong are the ones called administrators. Maybe the problem is that the people who deal with these issues everyday, the students and the teachers, have not done their part to try to get their concerns addressed; after all a person should…complain if he is unhappy with the way his government is working—right?  The problem is that that is not the problem at all, because the teachers and the students complain everyday, but nothing is done about it. Why, because reports say that students need computers to do well in school, and these expensive reports can’t be wrong.

 

But what the reports don’t say is that the computers need to work, and work everyday. And conveniently, what that parent who just came into the library doesn’t know is that two of the computers in the library are always broken and that no one can ever use the computers that do work anyway because the Library-Nazi says you need a pass to go in the library during class, even if that class is study hall. And all those TVs in the classrooms, they are used maybe five times a year. But what is most intriguing is that they don’t get any stations, so one would assume they are connected to a VCR, so the students can watch educational movies—like Fern Gully. In fact, all of the TVs are connected to a VCR, one of three. There are three VCRs for over one hundred televisions! If your going to be dumb enough to put a TV in every class, shouldn’t you be dumb enough to put a VCR in every class?

 

What does all this have to do with a citizen’s responsibility to correct his community? It shows that for that idea to work, the individuals called politicians (or in this case administrators) must also be smart enough to take the ideas of the citizens into account. But until that happens, communities and schools around the nation will be left with backwards rules and leaders, and high school students around the country will [be] left to wonder if Prussia is really a country or if their map (that is dated 1900) is just misspelled.