Another South Park review

This review is on episode five, season 12 of the animated series South Park. Click here for an in depth look at the plot. This episode, like most, has a couple plots which deal with a variety of social phenomenon. For the purpose of this review and blog I will be looking at the education aspect of the episode where Eric Cartman is granted the position of temporary teacher while Mrs Garrison is away. As a result of cheating the class gets very high test scores and Cartman is assigned to be a teacher for an inner city school. This episode deals with issues around race, poverty, and the problem of standardized testing.

Cartman thinks he is going to have a great impact on the inner city students when the character Kyle interrupts and points out that the students won't want to listen to a “middle class white boy”. This

brings up themes from George J. Sefa Dei and his article “Schooling as Community: Race, Schooling, and Education of African Youth” and the idea of Afro-Centric schooling, which would be an education system built around African identity and curriculum that is representative of their history, relevance and so on, so that black individuals are not to be alienated, which occurs in schools with Euro-Centric curriculum's. The idea of this type of school would also be applied to people of other
races so that those individuals are too not exposed to the alienation's that would be encountered as a result of them not feeling represented. Of course in the episode Cartman uses an accent and dresses to identify himself as Mexican-American, in a stereotypical way, so that the students don't feel that they are listening to a “middle class white boy” which is another attempt from the show to illustrate the alienating tendency of the education system by appointing white people as the one who deposits their white way of thinking into people who are not white.

The next theme involved in the episode is the use of standardized testing, which the writers seem to view as problematic and expressed it throughout. Basically Cartman teaches the students how to cheat in order to be successful, arguing that white people cheat to get by and that they will need to cheat and not get caught. The idea of standardized testing is not a bad idea within itself, it is what is assessed that is problematic, the fact that it is just remembering information that is deposited from the teacher to the student, otherwise viewed as being empty, which they then regurgitate the information, this is clearly a result of the predominating banking model of education. Standardized testing could however be successful if it were to test critical thinking skills and engagement with curriculum, for example the testing could be to apply theories or ideas with pop culture or modern problems which would test a more hands on approach, leading to less alienation as a result of otherwise not being taught how curriculum can be applied in the real world. By the end of the episode the students are congratulated and the school and Cartman's unknown methods are viewed as a success, the school and required test fail to truly test if any experience, knowledge or understanding of course concepts are gained by students, standardized testing only seeks good scores, therefore they are viewed as successful, then the city is falsely shown as successful which then politicians and administrations can claim success based solely on numbers.