“A Vision of Students Today”

The goal of the video text “A Vision of Students Today” was, like its title states, to bring awareness to the realities of students, mainly attending college. The video portrays an almost sad theme through the textual information that the college students in the classroom were holding up on their signs as well as the music playing in the background. The video itself was not only trying to bring awareness to the topic of college student hardships, but was also trying to influence the viewers through its tone. It has a good underlying purpose to bring the awareness that perhaps the educational institutions that set out to provide students with the next step to achieve a good quality career are actually not doing the best job they should be. One of the signs that a student held up said, “I facebook through most of my classes.” This also tells the viewer that the old teaching methods of buying books and have lectures in several classes, is not captivating their attention and therefore teaching them little.

This video I found to be informative, but was deeply surprised when I took the Robert Scholes approach and criticized the video. The one thing I found is that this video’s information was primarily comprised because of a survey that was taken in a single class of 200 students at a single university. The percentages did not reflect the whole populous of students attending college in the United States and therefore can not represent such a large body of people. Secondly it had a hidden message, I believe, to over empathize the college students and their educational plight. I hold that some classes may be as colorless and sullen as the one on video but I believe it was all a part of the videos intended manipulation of the viewer. This video was informative for what it was set out to do, but failed to grasp my full consideration on all of the topics and expressions portrayed.