The Oxford English Dictionary defines being “spoon-fed” as being “fed with a spoon.” And although this is most certainly true, there is so much more to the word.
As a child, I loved to be spoon-fed – mashed carrots, soft yams, mushy peas. I loved them all. But it didn’t end there. I also had an insatiable curiosity. Where did the dinosaurs go? Why is that man homeless? Where do babies come from? My parents would always patiently listen and spoon-feed me a quick and simple answer. Growing up I came to realize that some of them weren 't always entirely correct or even necessarily true. But they would set a very important precedent in my life. And if you look around, society has undergone a similar phenomenon that is really not all that different …show more content…
Never mind that they seldom reflect a sound understanding of the subject-matter. Instead of having students think things through, we have engineered an environment in which they are eagerly supplied answers only to be regurgitated in the form of multiple choice bubbles on test day. Outside-the-box thinking and creative problem-solving have all but been neutralized from the learning space. Furthermore, our generation is one filled with young men and women eager to devote their lives to a cause, and instead they are directed by society from a young age in the pursuit of affected relationships, lucrative but unfulfilling jobs, and meretricious cars and houses. Yet again we have been supplied the answers, this time before even conceiving the …show more content…
“It’s a black thing,” one shirt reads. You wouldn’t understand. At the first sign of trouble, we willfully feed ourselves stereotypes. We do this not so much because we are incapable of understanding one another, but because it’s not worth the effort to try.
And on a broader scale, we hate to tackle anything that poses a challenging question. We 'd rather just be spoon-fed an answer. Why? Because thinking scares us. Because it hurts. Because we hate the idea of not having an answer for everything, to not be able to make. Now we try to compartmentalize our entire lives so that there is no more doubt, no more confusion, no more ambiguity. No more food for thought to be laboriously chewed. But no matter how we do this, we aren 't truly making things better. In almost all cases these labels fail to encompass the entire meaning or distort reality
As a child, I loved to be spoon-fed – mashed carrots, soft yams, mushy peas. I loved them all. But it didn’t end there. I also had an insatiable curiosity. Where did the dinosaurs go? Why is that man homeless? Where do babies come from? My parents would always patiently listen and spoon-feed me a quick and simple answer. Growing up I came to realize that some of them weren 't always entirely correct or even necessarily true. But they would set a very important precedent in my life. And if you look around, society has undergone a similar phenomenon that is really not all that different …show more content…
Never mind that they seldom reflect a sound understanding of the subject-matter. Instead of having students think things through, we have engineered an environment in which they are eagerly supplied answers only to be regurgitated in the form of multiple choice bubbles on test day. Outside-the-box thinking and creative problem-solving have all but been neutralized from the learning space. Furthermore, our generation is one filled with young men and women eager to devote their lives to a cause, and instead they are directed by society from a young age in the pursuit of affected relationships, lucrative but unfulfilling jobs, and meretricious cars and houses. Yet again we have been supplied the answers, this time before even conceiving the …show more content…
“It’s a black thing,” one shirt reads. You wouldn’t understand. At the first sign of trouble, we willfully feed ourselves stereotypes. We do this not so much because we are incapable of understanding one another, but because it’s not worth the effort to try.
And on a broader scale, we hate to tackle anything that poses a challenging question. We 'd rather just be spoon-fed an answer. Why? Because thinking scares us. Because it hurts. Because we hate the idea of not having an answer for everything, to not be able to make. Now we try to compartmentalize our entire lives so that there is no more doubt, no more confusion, no more ambiguity. No more food for thought to be laboriously chewed. But no matter how we do this, we aren 't truly making things better. In almost all cases these labels fail to encompass the entire meaning or distort reality