Ralph Waldo Emerson is Wrong!

I do not agree with Emerson’s argument in “The American Scholar.”

Emerson says people only know what they are trained to do and nothing else. I think because we have an educational system with many classes, people are learning many different things. People learn something new every day in every class. My older brother is majoring in public affairs, but he is getting good grades in chemistry. Chemistry has nothing to do with public affairs. So he is learning more than what his future job requires him to do. He also says that people are becoming less intelligent. I disagree with this because teachers learn more things every year. Mrs. Skoronski has been teaching biology for many years, and just learned this year that plants only use 3% of the sunlight they receive. This proves Emerson wrong.

Emerson also says that people have individual jobs and only know what they are trained to do. This is not true. More people are taking 2 jobs and more people are working more hours. More married couples are working who have kids. For example, my sister’s boyfriend works at a supermarket and as a car mechanic. He is doing two completely different jobs and works seven days a week. Many people start out working for a store or shop, and then later take the job in a company. If the person does not move on in life, then Emerson would be correct, but most people do move passed a minimum wage paying job. This again proves Emerson wrong.

I do not however think that what Ralph Waldo Emerson believes in. I do believe in individualism, self-trust and self-reliance. I believe that no individual person is the same in any way as another person, and I believe that people need to trust that they are different. People also should believe in themselves to succeed.

In conclusion, Ralph Waldo Emerson is very smart, but I do not agree with him. The only thing I believe is true in “The American Scholar,” is that people are not as smart as they used to be. For example, when Albert Einstein invented nuclear energy, he did it by himself. Today, we would need a giant team to create nuclear energy (not to mention billions of dollars) if Einstein never did it for us. As crazy as this sounds, technology has improved immensely since the world’s greatest inventions were made, and people have not made very many great inventions.