I’m
going to talk about the idea of progress. This notion evokes a positive
evolution, the act of improving and perfecting mankind. In class, we have
studied many documents in relation with the notion and I’ve chosen four of them
which, according to me, represent the idea of progress the most and I’m going
to present them to you.
To begin, I’ve decided to talk
about scientific progress because, today, science is able to do what was once science
fiction like cloning, selective breeding and designer babies and that’s why I’ve
chosen the document I’m going to present.
It’s the cartoon on page 62 which illustrates the
theme of selective breeding. This picture represents a little skinny man
grabbed by a claw to be thrown in a trash container because he’s different from
the other men lined up on the conveyor belt. The cartoonist is trying to show
us with an ironic point of view how genetic selection works. But this funny
cartoon raises a problem. Indeed, we can imagine that this technique could be
used to create a perfect model of the man choosing what characteristics he
would own and this could lead to a world where there would be no place for
differences.
This fact is perfectly illustrated by the second
document I’ve chosen. It’s an article from an online newspaper about genetic
selection (on page 64). In this text, the technique is ironically compared to a
fast-food order that future parents would make to create the baby they want choosing
eye color, height and even IQ. If this idea could be frightening, it could also
be amazing if this technique was used to save a life as in the second article
studied in class.
But science isn’t the only thing to improve in our
present society, that’s why we decided to present two other documents about
another kind of progress: social progress.
Indeed, today, many things have to be changed to make
our society work better and it’s the reason why we are going to talk about a
document which concerns education. In fact, that’s a speech by Sir Ken Robinson
which explains how to change the education of today to allow to every child to
take place in the society because he says that the present education was
designed for a different age and that, now, it doesn’t work anymore. To be
efficient, he proposes to let children develop their differences to allow each
of them to think on their own.
As we are talking
about giving a chance to each person, we’re going to finish our presentation
with our last document which is a speech pronounced by Barack Obama. Indeed,
this document is about giving the American nationality to young people called
the dreamers who are sons and daughters of immigrants and who have always lived
in the USA. The President is explaining to all the American people that those
young people feel American in their heart and in their mind but they’re not on
paper and that’s why they deserve the American nationality, because they’ve
always lived in America, they sometimes even don’t know the country their
parents come from.
So
if we try to link together each document, we can say that each of them
represents a form of progress. Even if they are representing different types of
progress such as scientific or social progress, they are raising the same problem
because an advance can be called progress only if there are benefits for our
society and some advances like cloning or genetic selection create a debate,
many points of view confront each other : is it a good idea or not ? The
problem is exactly the same for social progress ; there are different points of
view… So, the question is : Can we call it a progress if the advance creates a
debate in our society?
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