Response to Chapter 1: "The Good Man Fills His Own Stomach"

After reading the first chapter in “The Wilding of America,” I learned how much society is affected by wilding. If one looks at it from the other side though, society actually influences and promotes instrumental and social wilding from a very young age. We are taught from a young age that if we want anything in life, we have to work hard for it and that if we do not accomplish the things we set out to accomplish and succeed, we did not try hard enough. The pressures put on students today to not only succeed academically but also in athletics only promotes wilding behaviors in our youth.

There is a standard of excellence expected from our youth today; a standard of academic excellence, athletic excellence, and social excellence. These are the standards set by our parents, teachers, administrators, other family members, peers, and most influencially society as a whole. Even before the beginning of a child’s academic career, it is expected that they perform in the top percentile for their age group and then in the top percentile in their grade and even within their school. The pressure is greater than it has even been for the students in our nation’s schools. There is so much expected of them and while parents realize this, they too fold under pressure. When pressure mounts, parents may encourage certain behaviors that in other circumstances they may not normally endorse. Society has placed this pressure on our students to succeed and reach their feel potential at any cost. This kind of pressure is then put on the shoulders of the parents who want their child to succeed and advance up “the ladder” in pursuit of wealth. Students feel this pressure and equate it as moving up is the only way to go and to get there, they must not allow others to stand in their way. They embark on a single-minded pursuit to advance oneself at the expense of others with no regards to how it may effect them.

Social wilding is defined as “collective forms of selfishness that weaken society” (Derber 9). This type of wilding is also affecting our schools systems and its students. Legislators and politicians set up a system that based the disbursement of state funds to districts on test scores. This means, the higher the test scores, the more funding their district would receive. On the surface this seems fair but if one takes a closer look, it is actually backwards. The government is taking part in social wilding when they pass legislation like this. The schools receiving lower test scores should receive more aid in my opinion so that the students enrolled in those schools can have the resources to improve their test scores and have the opportunity to receive their share of the funds. Instead, this legislation is increasing the chances of the already succeeding schools in receiving more funding and decreasing the chances of the struggling schools to receive future funding by ignoring the reasons those schools are currently not producing adequate test scores.

Instrumental and social wilding makes achieving the American dream just that much harder and more complicated for our youth. Increased pressures to achieve this dream and to advance oneself at any cost is causing the students in our nation to cheat, lie, act out of greed, and compete at unhealthy levels in which relationships are severed. By promoting these kinds of values, society is creating individuals with ambition but unfortunately individuals with ambition but no empathy for others. Working together and cooperatively to reach goals is not longer the trend in our youth because of the wilding taking place within our society today.