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Rhetorical Analysis Essay On The Water

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Freedom of education prevents people from being enslaved to ignorance. Education gives people a sense of freedom, and it also gives them the option of “deciding what has meaning and what doesn’t” in their life. In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, The Water, he argues that education should teach us how to be well adjusted, deciding on how to think and what to pay attention to instead of going to our default setting of negativity.
David Foster Wallace is right because he thinks that real education is learning to be well adjusted. Freedom of education teaches us how to decide what has and what does not have meaning in our lives, it should teach us how to think not what to think, it should be able to help us develop our critical and …show more content…
In his speech David Foster Wallace states that education should teach us how to be well adjusted, to make a conscious decision about what to pay attention to. He gives an example saying at the end of your day, after you’re done with your “white-collar, college graduate job,” all you want to do is go home, unwind, and sleep early, because you have to do the routine again, but instead you have to go to the supermarket which takes a longer time than it actually should. Then, David Wallace says our natural default setting is all about us. We only think about our problems, our desire to get home, our hungriness, and so forth. But several paragraphs down, he says that while he was in traffic going back home instead of thinking about himself and his problems, he started to pay attention to other people’s problem. He says that the hummer cutting him off was probably driven by a father who is trying to get his child to the hospital because they were sick, which in this case the father’s problem would be more important than David Wallace’s situation. Since David Wallace is basically telling us that we should think about other people’s problems, is he also asking the father to think about someone else's problem instead of his, even though he has the right to have the natural default setting of thinking about himself? So being well adjusted shouldn’t be only thinking about other people's problems when we’ve

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