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Abby Henson
Becky Shelton
ENG 102
Rhetorical Analysis Final Draft
25 February 2015
Learning about Learned Helplessness
The issue of children failing in school and teens dropping out of high school has been an
issue for some time now. There is always someone trying to come up with a solution to this
problem in education. Sometime in the early nineties, Robert Gordon M.S. and his wife Myrna
Gordon M.A. wrote an article about the concept of “learned helplessness” and how it is causing
children to fail in school. In their article, “Why Are Our Children Failing In School”, the couple
discusses how a lack of motivation in kids today isn’t a cognitive choice being made, but rather a
side effect of a psychological issue known as learned helplessness. The article is academic and
informational, providing a solution to the problem of learned helplessness and the high number
of failing students. In addition to this article, the couple also has a website that shares more
information about this topic, which is where this article was originally published. The Gordons
provide an effective argument in this article by not only using their own research and expertise,
but their word choice evokes a powerful emotional response from the reader as well as reiterates
the importance of the topic.
The main claim the Gordons make in “Why Are Our Children Failing School” is that we
are approaching teaching in the wrong way; we often blame children for lack of motivation when
in reality it is a side effect of learned helplessness (1). The article defines learned helplessness as
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a “…psychological break down in student’s strategies” (Gordon 1), as well as “…refusing to take
charge: somebody’s failure to take action to make his or her life better arising from the sense of
not being in control” (Gordon 2). More importantly though, the couple emphasizes that this is a
learned behavior. After many failures, a student comes to expect failure as “inevitable” (Gordon
3) and they simply just stop trying. The good news is, is that learned helplessness is preventable
and treatable. According to the Gordons, we just need to determine how the child thinks and try
to reshape their reactions to failures.
The most prominently used rhetoric in this article is logos. The Gordons depend heavily
on their facts and research to back up their claim, and in its academic setting, it is more than
effective. The facts aren’t heavily concentrated in one area of the article either. The entire piece
