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The youth are in an entirely bad way; our education has utterly degraded many of our minds to a rather dull and shallow level of thought. I would argue that this collapse owes itself to a disregard for the classics and otherwise archaic genres of study.

The contemporary educational system has attempted to develop a greater appreciation of literature and society by reducing itself to the dim and unimaginative culture of the youth. Lessons would rather bother with matters of popular culture in a crude attempt to make their subject more enjoyable to their students. Subsequently, they bastardize and neglect matters of great importance. They believe the mind of the young is so elementary, so pale and lusterless, that matters of global calamity should be considered a mere sidestep.

When we refer to this degradation of the mind, we define it as the frequent and false assumption that the youth cannot possibly comprehend anything beyond their pop culture.  Consider the following, we may be gathered for an English lecture one afternoon, our educators show us a video of some musical spectacle.  Something of little value or intelligent effort, or some brief song of modern pop.  We then continue the lecture discussing this meaningless affair, and what it means to us, the student.  Not only is it a strange notion to discuss an otherwise vacuous thing, but it is all the more odd that we should discuss what it means to us.  We are only students, after all. Yet our culture indulges itself so thoroughly in individualism, that we find ourselves obliged to discuss our personal lives.  How self-centered and ignorant does one need to be, to find their individual affairs worth discussing?  Especially if this is the trivial affairs of the youth, who, after all, are taught to ignore historic and ongoing global catastrophes.

Discussion of cardinal thought – that being the understanding of human nature, history, and ideology – is far more important to the youth than our professed culture. Whether they agree with that statement or not. Only truly intellectual thought can be conveyed with a higher degree of vocabulary; rather, we are encouraged to engage ourselves in slang and otherwise crude and uncouth language. The use of a more cultivated diction is often swiftly dismissed to some rigid archaism or outdated bluster. Rather, I would repulse such claims; a classical vocabulary or verbosity is ultimately beneficial to our society.

We are taught that the effectiveness of writing will conclusively decide our essay structure and its accessibility. Perhaps our writing may find itself more enigmatic, and yet only to a relatively gentle degree. But, when an argument is conducted, its validity is surely only prevailed by its elegance. Those writings, of any style, are greater in their objective, as they can be simply discerned as superior in their intellect. Whereby, the reader may find themselves entranced by the fluttering of words and breezing movement of seemingly dead phrases. It implies some dignity and therefore credibility to an essay or writing.

On the contrary, writings of greater accessibility are often quite concise, and yet they are in no sense charismatic. Extraordinary insights have seldom been realized throughout history by the use of bland yet perfectly functional language. Lenin and Martin Luther had ascended to historical and cultural godhood, whereby their charisma and magnetic diction had allowed them to complete that ascension. But our education apparatus has brought forward no Martin Luther, nor has it endowed our decadent society with any Lenin. We merely manufacture a lifeless but easily realized style of writing, one that subjugates our generation to intellectual ignorance.

We must confess, however, that we know we may not hold any meaningful insight. Not only that, but we would never compare ourselves to those who do. However, we must surely be educated with the intellectual dexterity to realize that, and ultimately the means of fashioning great thought and contribution.

In summary, it is only fair that we are given the education to ascend to the same intellect of past generations.