Kyle Ducay
Dr. Evans
ENGL 101
8 September 2015
4 Summaries
• “Idiot Nation”
In documentary and film director Michael Moore’s essay, “Idiot Nation” Moore aims to bring to light the seemingly mass tolerance and acceptance of ignorance among the American public. Moore argues that even the president of the United States, or the “Idiot-in-Chief” (123) even likes to boast of his unawareness. Moore uses in-your-face, blunt statements of statistics meant to scare and motivate his readers into doing something about the problem that the nation is facing. He wants people to be aware of the large corporate conglomerates’ façade of trying to bring better education into schools, when those corporations are actually feeding subliminal messages and advertisements…show more content… Gatto rhetorically poses the question, how are the children stuck in the outdated, robotic, dehumanizing, and outright boring school system supposed to learn and succeed if even the teachers “didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more”? Akin to Moore’s disdain for traditional education, Gatto further argues one of the reasons that the American society continues to keep the system it has, is to appease the interests of the corporations looking to profit off the naïve and susceptible minds of American schoolchildren, to turn educational facilities into “drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.”…show more content… The poem tells a story of how while she was a Mexican-American child in elementary school, she was looked down upon for trying to do well and succeed by other Mexican-American children. These children looked down upon her because they saw her success in the predominantly white system as a regression from her heritage and that she was “playing right into [the teachers’] hands” (199). Hernandez Avila explains how by defying the stereotypical culture of not caring about school, she was also defying the preset racial boundaries, going above and beyond to show white people that other races, too are capable of achievement, contrary to 1950’s popular belief. The poem is also a call to action because at the end, Avila forgives the girl, Teresa who called her out, because Avila understands where Teresa was coming from, and understands that they were fighting the same fight, just in different ways. Avila wants her readers to thoroughly seek to understand other’s opinions, to find common ground, rather than to immediately judge and