Our Nation's:Why America's Children Are Falling Behind"

ENG 1102

Read the following “academic” paper and identify what makes the paper weak. What fallacies can you spot, and what questionable evidence do I use? After identifying such weaknesses, what advice would you give me?

Our Nation’s Failure: Why America’s Children Are Falling Behind

To walk into any American school during this century is a shocking experience. In classrooms across the nation, students still learn math and reading, yet many lack the ability to describe what a healthy diet entails. For too long our schools have allowed this ignorance to continue, serving unhealthy lunches and forgoing proper health education. These missteps have damaged our students, creating a generation that neither has the options or skills to lead healthy lives.

Regardless of age, children prefer fresh produce and will gravitate towards this option, even when other, sugary choices are available. A study published in the 1954 Journal of Health states that, “children, from very early on in their development, learn what wholesome food is and develop a preference for them, if the option is continually offered” (Smith 12). Yet despite these findings, 80% of schools provide only fried, high-fat meals. These lunches lead to sluggish behavior that lowers academic performance. According to my colleague, who has taught in the public schools, kids who eat these high-fat lunches on a daily basis cannot concentrate and often have difficulty grasping even simple concepts.

To further support this claim, many online blogs find that children who eat the recommended daily amount of produce outperform their peers on standardized tests by an average of ten points. Because healthy eating is so strongly linked to academic performance, schools could raise their students’ abilities to comprehend material by replacing options such as cookies with green beans. Not only would this simple step improve test scores across the nation; it would also ensure our students are competitive when the time comes for them to enter the global workforce.

As superstar Kim Kardashian states in her memoir L.A. Dreams, “Eating healthy is the best way to truly feel happy” (84). School administrations would be wise to take this quote into mind when creating lunch menus. Many students, tired of feeling sluggish and depressed, want nothing more than daily access to quality nutrition. “Sometimes I feel like sleeping at my desk,” Ricky Divers, 4th grade student at Monument High told me in a recent interview. “The lunches I eat at school make me so tired. I know if I ate better food, I’d feel different but my school doesn’t really give me a choice.” The threat is clear: high-fat diets, the main staple of American schools, are turning our students into sluggish individuals who lack critical thinking skills. These lunches have also led many children to develop Type 2 Diabetes, a life altering condition that can lead to blindness.

Schools in thirty states have already taken steps to eliminate this threat and it is time for Colorado to fall in line or risk being seen as a close-minded, ineffective educational system. So the choices are clear: either we give our children access to better nutrition or allow them to develop diabetes and fall behind in their studies. Superintendent Larry Belding’s assertion that “healthy eating is merely a fad” cannot be taken seriously, considering he has had to enter detox twice in the last five years. Students would not refuse to eat healthier options, as he believes, because they relish freshly grown produce over processed snacks. No well-informed person would disagree that vegetables would help children focus in the classroom. Mr. Belding is content to turn our schools into candy shops, yet clearly this is a flawed proposal.

The time has come for our schools’ cafeterias to change. Even overweight children desire friendships, yet their deformed bodies close these doors, forcing many to linger in their rooms on the weekends, alone, with nothing but their computer screens. We need to offer these children a better chance at life, for failure to do so will result in generation of lonely adults who lack the intellectual skills to thrive in the modern world.