Education Unplugged Analysis Essay

In his essay, Education Unplugged, Floyd Allen, the author combined three methods of development, process, cause-effect, and argument method, in order to strengthen the effectiveness of the message he was conveying. According to Allen, generally, the society today rely on â€Å"pseudo-intelligence,† which means that people, particularly the youth, depend too much on technology to perform their work for them including even the simplest tasks like counting small amounts of money or basic math. The author claims that the only way to solve this is for educators to give more emphasis on teaching more the fundamental or basic lessons in school than focusing on computer education. Among the three processes used by the author, the most dominant and most effective one is the argumentative method. In the essay, Allen argued that young people nowadays can no longer perform a lot of basic tasks without resorting to an electronic device first. In order to support his claims, the author used as an example his experience with a female fast food employee who had to call for help just to count his change of 99 cents. He also cited other examples of too much reliance on pseudo-intelligence such as the inability of the tellers to make transactions with clients when the system is down and the inability of children to tell the time if the clock has hands. Generally, the use of solid examples and instances is the one of the most effective ways to convey the message an author would like to impart to his or her readers when making an argument. In the essay, Allen’s use of real life scenarios greatly bolstered his claims on pseudo-intelligence because readers were able to relate to them. He also used solid examples when he provided the solution to society’s problem such as concentrating more on teaching students the basics of writing, reading, and arithmetic instead of focusing on making them computer literate.