How Not To Get Into College, By Alfie Kohn

Intrinsic value defines itself to be a set of ethics that is dependent upon an individual’s morals. The intrinsic value of anything is often given a hidden meaning. Alfie Kohn’s essay “How not to get into College”, Heron Jones’s poem “Somnambulist”, and the episode “Rosebud” from the television show, The Simpsons, shows how finding true meaning and motivation in life can be very difficult and also reveals deeper meaning of how it is better to be motivated intrinsically rather than extrinsically.

To begin, in these three pieces, the authors clearly show that when one is extrinsically motivated, they go through life unware of what they can truly achieve. In “How not to get into College”, this theme is shown when Alfie Kohn has a concern about

In Alfie Kohn’s essay, the argument of grade expectations being too overvalued rests on a chain of assumptions, but can be argued. Alfie Kohn’s essay portrays that he wants students to find a variety of different purposes in school, and questions the idea of grades being too centralized. In detail, Alfie Kohn explains how students go to school not for the right reasons, but for the wrong reasons instead. For example, the author writes, “They’d scan the catalogue for college courses that promised easy A’s, sign up for new extracurricular-activities to round out their resumes, and react with gratitude when a professor told them exactly what they would have to know for the exam so they could ignore everything else” (para. 8). Here, it shows how students are “grade grubbers” (para. 4), which ruins the whole purpose of the enjoyment of learning. The effect that this has is that it shows how students lost the true meaning of learning. In order to understand why this is happening, grades themselves need to be delved into. Students throughout their lives are indoctrinated with the concept that grades are what matter the most which is the underlying factor. Correspondingly, Jones’s poem reveals the meaning that the workers can accomplish wonders by themselves if they have the passion to peruse it. Doing something just for the grades, and not seeing the bigger picture is walking in another man’s dream, as it might be implying that the worker is in a corporate industry working hard, tired, and treated as a slave. In The Simpsons, Mr. Burns is being driven by external sources of happiness like the items he owns. What this does to Mr. Burns is that it supersedes his definition of happiness which results in him being morally unsatisfied. In essence, an individual’s