Percy V Rodriguez

Percy v Rodriguez

At the beginning of the year, students enter the AP classroom ready to learn. The teacher starts off by telling the students that they will have a tremendous amount of homework, usually around one and a half to two hours worth, every night. Some students will get excited because they want to learn and with two hours of homework every night, how could they not be getting tons of information. However, the problem is, in AP classes, all students are getting is information but they are not taught how to use the information. The whole class is geared towards the final AP exam at the end of the year. This will tell the students how many facts they have remembered from that year and that is all. AP classes are the worst classes a high school student can take for an education. AP classes do not give the students an opportunity to be sovereign knowers and they encourage scholarship boy-type students.

Because AP classes require so much homework, the only information the student is getting is the information provided by the instructor. For most AP classes, homework takes about an hour, maybe two to complete. Most students in an AP class are in at least two AP classes, which means that these students have a lot of homework. Because students have so much homework, they do not have time for anything else but what is assigned. They cannot ask questions for themselves and put things together because students struggle just to get the nightly homework done. This makes it impossible for a student in AP to be sovereign over their education. Since the student has no time for anything but the given assignment, the student is receiving only what the instructor gives them. To Percy, these students are called “consumers” because the students are receiving a package: the information the teacher gives them. “The pupil at Scarsdale High sees himself placed as a consumer receiving an experience-package” (Percy). Consumers completely miss out on the creature, which is, in this case, the students’ education. Percy also states, “a consumer may surrender sovereignty…” Consumers give up their sovereignty because they are allowing the teacher to give them the information instead of using the teacher to get the information for themselves. Therefore, is it possible for the students in AP classes, consumers, to be sovereign over their own education? Most likely not. Of course, there are anomalies; students who will use their teachers as a tool and learn things for themselves despite the structure of an AP class, which is to give a bunch of facts all year and then give an exam to see how many facts they the students remember. However, most high school students cannot do this. In most cases, a different class where the students must think for themselves would be a much better education than an AP class.

Scholarship boys, according to Rodriguez, place the importance of tests and the accumulation of facts and knowledge above everything else. He states, “[The scholarship boy] tends to over-stress the importance of examinations, of the piling-up of knowledge and of received opinions. He discovers a technique of apparent learning, of the acquiring of facts rather than of the handling and use of facts”. An AP class creates a perfect environment for this “piling-up of knowledge” because in an AP class, the students acquire tons of facts throughout the year and at the end, they take the AP exam. This kind of rigorous class structure makes it easier for students to become scholarship boys, or at least push those students on the borderline of being scholarship boys over the edge. Rodriguez had to ask for all the extra work to do to keep himself busy. While Rodriguez came home and worked on homework, he was separating himself from his family, which is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of a scholarship boy. Instead of having to ask for extra work like Rodriguez did, AP students are provided with as much work as they can handle. Inevitably, when students go home with huge workloads, they begin to separate from their families, at least temporarily. However, most students cannot become full scholarship boys because there are many other factors that go into determining a scholarship boy. AP classes will create some characteristics of scholarship boys though and this will cause some separation between the AP student and their families. The end result of being a scholarship boy could be that they achieved their desire, getting through AP and accumulating facts, but the AP student, even in the short time that they are in the class, can lose