Safin Singh

Dafoe

APEL

21 August 2022

Stein Precis EC

In his Op-Ed, “We’re teaching kids to follow their dreams. Maybe teach them to be helpful instead,” Joel Stein argues that today’s children are encouraged to merely display the values of grit and determination rather than truly make a difference in our society. In one instance, Stein uses parallelism to show that influential figures did not focus on the fact that what they were doing was just or revolutionary, but rather that the outcome affected them and the cause they cared about. He writes, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not toil to be one of the first female Supreme Court justices; she fought to expand the rights of all women… If Malala had actually been in that classroom listening to how she pursued her dream like some YouTube influencer, she would have rescinded the right of girls to go to this school.” Ginsburg and Malala are both remarkable individuals in their own right, but the use of parallelism is intended to emphasize the fact that neither of them did it with the intent of being awarded or achieving something. Stein initially states what their goal was not and then transitions into the real effects of their work or what it would have been if they were going for a certain title. By writing in this fashion, Stein undermines those who praise the ideas of working solely for their personal benefit because both sentences first refute that point of view. In another excerpt, the author uses absolute language to further attack this mindset: “If we can’t stress to our kids the importance of helping other people while they are enacting stories about helping other people, we are in trouble. We’ll wind up with a nation of adults who only see others as obstacles.” The use of the word “only” is quite extreme but its purpose is to amplify the issues with the belief that hard work is an ideal that must be attained rather than simply part of a larger, more impactful goal. Stein establishes a fairly harsh tone in these sentences as he seems to be frustrated with the attitude that we have instilled in a majority of our younger generation. This tone also seems to have been meant to upset the reader in such a way that they feel like they should make a change in the way they view the issue because of the potential detrimental effects it could have on our future. Overall, Stein expresses the challenges he personally sees in his son’s classroom regarding teaching students how to be an active and helpful person rather than simply praising “good qualities” such as determination. Using rhetorical strategies such as parallelism and absolute language, he intends to convince the reader of the fact that we must change our outlook on educating our children.