Kareem Abdul Jabbar Analysis

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar believes that the issue with America’s education system is not the ignorance of students, but their inability to reason with information. Abdul-Jabbar starts his argument by pointing out some of the ignorance in the education system. He points out a few cases where students refused to read material that may have challenged their beliefs. He then states that the country has no problem with funding education, but teachers mainly feed facts to students and then give them tests, leaving little room for the tough questions. Most importantly, Abdul-Jabbar claims that the war on education is a war on reason. Dating back almost 400 years ago, philosopher Francis Bacon concluded that humans struggle to discuss information contradictory

to their beliefs. Abdul-Jabbar then proves this point by mentioning studies done and how the use of internet increases the ability to strengthen bias and dodge reason. Overall, he congratulated the students who stood up because they questioned the authority, but he still believes they preferred to take the easy way out, instead of reasoned arguments. Abdul-Jabbar strongly agrees that students must be willing to use school as a tool to find who they are, mold their opinions, and respect education and others. I agree that school should allow for more chances to question opinions because time after time I find myself going through the motions and memorizing material. When we discussed philosophy in class, so many of us struggled to form opinions, but it was refreshing to just think! My only disagreement is that students should be willing to challenge their opinion, but if material is truly offensive to them, they should not have to do it, but that is in extreme cases. I think Abdul-Jabbar proved his point through strong evidence, but he did add some political bias. When first discussing the war on reason, he added a lot of negative information on the republican party’s inability to reason, which I though was unnecessary considering this topic is on students.