Cultural Analysis: The School By Donald Barthelme

“The School” Cultural Analysis

“The School” by Donald Barthelme was a short story that was seemingly idle in nature. There was no true conflict(s) in the short story as it was primarily told in the past tense,thus signaling no current issues. Despite the pointless nature of “The School” it really struck a chord with me in terms of bringing up a strong cultural divide on the ever present issue of educating children about issues like death, and sex. The contrast between current education and the education present in the farce reality in “The School” is almost satirical. In most contemporary curriculums there is to be no talk of death in schools, especially schools with children who are deemed too young to handle such an extraordinary concept. …show more content…
Students have no real world experience because as our curriculums gear towards more safety oriented and politically correct lessons plans, we see much more descriptions of issues by teachers to students than schools actually providing the experience. The story shows that there is a strong need for description when teaching a young person about a concept such as death. The lack of basic instruction and guidance led the children to develop a detached and demented look at death by the end of the short story. They had no concept or feel for what death meant. Despite this clear need for guidance, children also must have experience with these difficult ideas and concepts. Children today have all the guidance in the world yet many have no practical experience with these topics. When these touchy subjects do come up they understand it but feel distanced because the idea of really experiencing the things that they’re taught is a foreign concept to young people everywhere. I think that the point of the satirical nature of the short story was to point out the obvious need for change in our curricula. The need for change constitutes an ideological shift, our system needs to go from instruction based to an equally leveled out experience and instructionally based contemporary …show more content…
The sheer ineptitude for teaching that the narrator displays throughout the story is used to represent many of the teachers today. The story doesn’t necessarily bash the teachers putting out the material, it mostly bashes the material itself which doesn 't allow the teachers to express themselves while teaching. Although I do not believe that kids are being taught by sheer experience like in the story, I do believe that experience and instruction need to balance out if we want to restore proper education throughout the world we know and love. With a combination of the two we could readily prepare kids for dealing with difficult issues like death much later in their