Big Ass English Paper
Throughout his life Ender has to worry about a whole lot ore than if a girl likes him, Ender has to think and decide whether or not he has it in him to save the world. Most people have their entire early lives/childhood to decide what they want to do, but Ender never had the opportunity to have a proper childhood, he was robbed off childhood. So all of this Is great, but what does It really mean to be robbed of something?
According to Oxford Dictionaries, “rob” means, to “Deprive (someone or something) of something needed, deserved, or significant” (Use 1. 3). “Robbed of” also means to “Take property unlawfully from a person by force or threat of force” (Use 11. Finally, “rob” means to “Overcharge (someone or something)” (Use 1. 1 The most appropriate definition is to “Deprive someone of something needed, deserved, or significant. ” Children are being “deprived,” defined as to “Deny a person the possession or use of something”. Of something needed, deserved, or significant] in this case it is significant and proven, as “There is a growing body of research that shows a link between play and the development of cognitive and social skills that are prerequisites for learning more complex concepts as children get older”(Dry. Leone). If hillier only work and don’t have any time to go outside or have social interaction then kids will be less successful than if they had the free time.
Basically Dry. Leone Is saying that If kids don’t have a childhood, then they will be less successful. What exactly Is a childhood then? A childhood Is defined by Oxford Dictionaries, as “The state of being a child”. Or “The period during which a person is a child” (“Childhood” 1. 1 Which technically everyone experiences, but as portrayed in most movies children don’t experience stress and certainly don’t think about the world ending.
The difference between a child who is stress free up until adulthood and Ender is the one who is stress free only worries about his own fate, therefore, only thinks about his own opinion and doesn’t have to think about what is best for other people but only what is important to him. Ender has to think about how he will get through the training without being ruined mentally, or being killed by others in the school. At first in the academy he was concerned about his grades, he was passing all of his classes but he was worried about being distracted and allowing his grades to slip.
But later In the year he had no choice but to give up school work all together and 100 percent on saving humanity as well as surviving the attacks from his list of enemies (which When Ender was in school and being tested, he learned many things. All of which were things that adults learn when they are in the military, but Ender (along with hundreds of other boys and girls), is forced to act like an adult from a young age which may put him at a disadvantage when compared to those who had free time as a child.
Someone cannot live or function properly if they have been deprived of a childhood. In relation to children being “given back” their childhoods, Peter Gray (A research professor of psychology at Boston College, and author of ‘Psychology) said, “The real problems Vive faced in life include physical ones (such as how to operate a newfangled machine at work or unblock the toilet at home), social ones (how to get that perfect woman to be interested in me), moral ones (whether to give a passing grade to a student, for effort, though he failed all the tests)” (Gray 1).
From his career and his life or as a teacher, or even as a student, he learned a lot of things, but all of hose did nothing to help him when he was confronted by odd problems. Strange things that could only be dealt with if one had experienced them before, and the only way to do that is by allowing children to have more time for play and less time for work. Although Ender is an orphan, he can still experience these things, and by saying he wouldn’t be able to have play because he was signed to the military, would be saying that because he is an orphan, he does not deserve time for play.
Gray continues on to say, “Most problems in life cannot be solved with formulae or memorized answers of the type learnt in school” (Gray 1). Kids need time to be able to figure things out on their own. While some ,like Auk’s education secretary, think that more hours in school will raise test scores, others like the Chinese ministry of education, issued a report calling for less time in school, less homework, and less reliance on test scores as a means of Judging schools. So if children were given more time to play (games) instead of taking tests, they could be more successful.
Many people, like Hillarie Cash (a Technology addictions expert), say that kids who rarely play outside make it a habit to stay inside rather than going out with friends. Some would say that Ender plays games his whole life with his friends, which although is partly true, children need to have minimal structure and to have an environment which isn’t pressured. Additionally 95% of the children Ender plays with are either not his friends and there for the training, or they obviously hate him and make an effort to bully/harass Ender or Just make his life a living hell.
The entire time that Ender is battling, people are watching and Judging him, they are also constantly making things more challenging for him so as soon as he becomes comfortable with nee thing they make it more difficult and he is forced to adapt (like in battle). They are doing this by adding more games in a day and by forcing him to do things he does not want to do. The best way (and way it is argued in above articles) is to have the children choose their own games, or to play games/sports they enjoy playing.
This is because the children learn quicker and easier if they have fun while doing something, and while Ender enjoyed himself at first, right about when he was made a commander he started to hate the position because of the amount of work he had to do without frequent breaks, or breaks at all. Much like Ender, people from different cultures in the past have also been limited by their government or way of life. For example in India they had the caste system, affirmative action (positive discrimination)” (Independence Hall Association).
The caste system included four levels of a pyramid, they have the Brahmins, Ashtrays, Visas, and Sutras. Although there is no social pyramid with Ender, they have a rule that families cannot have more than two children unless they sign one over to the military. This sounds terrible but Mender’s parents did this because both of their prior hillier almost made it into the army but they had their own personality flaws on opposite poles, Valentine was too nice, and Peter was too mean.
Because of this, Mender’s parents thought (and hoped) that if they had a child on either side of the spectrum, that their third child would be in the center, perfectly balanced. The original definition of “deprive” is “Take property unlawfully from (a person or place) by force or threat of force” (“Childhood” 1). This when used in the above thesis is stating that a childhood is a child’s property, and you are committing a crime and literally robbing them. Ender is technically robbed from his parents because when Graff asked them if he could talk to Ender outside (alone), and declined, he said, muff really can’t stop me. ” (Card 51).
When he says this he is reminding them that before Ender was born he was given away to the government, and if Graff wanted to, he could take Ender away and they wouldn’t be able to stop him or do anything about it. Another, more playful, definition of “rob” is, “informal or dialect steal” (“Rob” 1. 2). Although this definition in this form is in a more Joking manner, it still has some very good examples to go with it. Ender robs (“Rob” 1. 2) others of winning frequently, and robs his friends of the commander position. Ender would frequently win games and subsequently rob others of their positions on the leaderless as well.
The definition of overcharge is “To lay an excessive burden (of trouble, care, responsibility, etc. ) upon; to press hard, oppress, distress, overtax; to overbear by superior force” (“Overcharge” 2. 2) . This definition relates to Mender’s Game because throughout the book, Ender and his friends/enemies say things hinting about the game having real people in them. At one point prior to fighting Bonze Ender said four move”(Card 208). Bonze then replied with, “This isn’t a game” (Card 208). When Bonze tells Ender this isn’t a game, even though he isn’t referring to battles, and is instead, referring to the fight.
The author is giving away the end of the book Just in this short quote. Additionally after changing his battle schedule to more than two battles a day -when the normal is one battle per day-, one of the people in the government said, “We want to teach him, not give him a nervous breakdown” (Card 210). In this quote they are directly talking about overcharging, or laying an excess burden on Ender. They are intentionally making his battle schedule ridiculous so he will be the best he can be, and be prepared regardless of the circumstances.
People from the government always give Ender more and more challenging tasks or things that people have never had to deal with before. When they do this to Ender, he is given an excessive responsibility which is also a huge burden. As Ender is trained more frequently and harder, the challenges he deals with gradually become more and more challenging, and unsurprisingly, Ender becomes more distressed and emotionally taxed. A perfect example would be when he would dream about Valentine, Peter, and all of his friends, and wake up “eating” his hand or scared.
Those reactions show how taxing the training is on Ender and his mental health. That the battle was easier than most of the other -simulation- battles he fought. Amaze responded with, “This is a simulation of a real invasion. ” making Ender believe that the battle was an easy starting simulation, and continues on to say, “There had to be one battle where they wouldn’t know what we would do. ” (Card 280). In this section, Amaze is depriving Ender of his right to know what is reality and what is a emulation, and by doing so, Amaze is able to have full control over Ender and make him do whatever he wants.
In the end of the book after Ender defeated the Bugger’s and won the war. Amaze told Ender , “… They all were there and you destroyed them all. Real. Not a game” it then says “Mender’s mind was too tired to cope with it all” (Card, 297). In this passage you can really see how tired Ender is and how he really had no idea how to cope with that kind of trauma at the time. For the last four plus years he was very stressed, the last few years especially because of all of the additional stuff he had to suffer wrought.
Ender throughout his entire life was training to one day be able to be a “real” commander, when he was a real commander the whole time. This sort of lying was used because they knew if they didn’t lie, that Ender wouldn’t want to actually kill (questionably innocent) bugger’s, and especially wouldn’t want to risk the lives of his own soldiers, and Maser’s friends, for what could potentially be a pointless war. As proven above, a childhood has a lot of positive effects on a child, and without a childhood, a child could be at a disadvantage mentally when compared to another who had more time away from constant schooling and stress.
