Americans have been known to reflect on East Asian education systems, then compare those systems to the education system here in the United States. When doing so, people tend to come to the same general conclusion: there are intensifying problems within the American education system. Marc Prensky, the author of “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” argues that the real issue with educating today’s youth is that our education system was not designed to teach them because today’s students are not the same as the students our education system was built around years and years ago. He refers to today’s students as “digital natives” and their educators as “digital immigrants.” Prensky delivers this argument through his syntax/diction and his overall …show more content…
But at the same time, he uses the word we when talking about immigrants, establishing ethos by showing the intended audience (immigrants) that he, too, is a Digital Immigrant. Even with the said, the word “immigrant” is used twenty-seven times throughout this article – Prensky’s technique for strengthening the negative connotations of it. At one point, he even writes, “school often feels pretty much as if we’ve brought in a population of heavily accented, unintelligible foreigners to lecture them” (2). Prensky’s diction here is deliberately making out Digital Immigrants to be “different.” His referring to them as “unintelligible foreigners” is his method for creating an “us versus them” mentality and again utilizing pathos in an unorthodox manner. Not only does Prensky draw a line between immigrants and Natives, but he re-enforces that divide as he continues making his argument. Aside from that, Prensky begins to use diction such as obvious (2) when referring to Natives and of course (3) when discussing an Immigrant’s disadvantage, imposing his belief that Natives are the “norm” and immigrants should learn to keep up. This belief alone is enough to encourage some immigrants to begin accommodating for their students. At this point, he is moving passed identifying educational issues from an Immigrant’s perspective, and beginning to analyze them with the underlying condescending tone that immigrants are the ones at fault. From the beginning, Prensky has been defining the Native-Immigrant divide, and it all begins to tie into a larger metaphor: the