A Modest Proposal

America is facing an epidemic in its schools today—apathy. Students have lost their love of learning. What school work they do is not in the interest of learning, but is done rather merely to get the good grades that are required for one’s future. Some students are so apathetic that they do not even bother trying to get those good grades. Children’s loss of the love of learning is a terrible tragedy that needs a solution. Luckily I've come up with one.

The answer is desensitization. Students just need to get more exposure to school work, so that they stop dreading it and adjust. How do we desensitize them? The answer is simple, homework. Kids these days are too distracted by extracurricular activities. They hang out with friends, play sports, exercise, have jobs, eat, and want to sleep. We need to replace these activities with homework. If teachers assign endless amounts of homework that consume the children’s every waking moment and even limit their sleeping ones, then children will have no choice but to adjust to learning and will, perhaps, even learn to love it... eventually.

Desensitization has many benefits. Not only will it help students develop an appreciation for learning, it will also save schools a lot of trouble. Instead of teachers worrying about whether or not their class is actually benefiting their students. In fact, they don’t even need to worry about respecting their student’s time and energy. They can just assign any random assignment they can think of, which will save time on actual lesson planning.

Some might object that this plan is insensitive to the needs of teenagers. They suggest that teenagers need to eat, exercise, and sleep in order to be healthy, but is it more important to be healthy or to learn? The other objection, that teenagers can’t handle the level of stress that that quantity of homework puts on them, is false. Sure, they might have a mental breakdown, but at least they’ll have learned something.

Overall, learning desensitization will make teacher’s lives easier and help students adjust to the educational process. Some have suggested that in order to decrease student’s apathy or sometimes even dread of school classes should put less focus on grades and more focus on teaching the students to appreciate and value what they are learning.