GRE Issue Essay Evaluation

[thorne]

Thank you so much for everyone's help!

Topic:

Claim: Governments must ensure that their major cities receive the financial support they need in order to thrive.

Reason: It is primarily in cities that a nation's cultural traditions are preserved and generated.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.

 

Essay:

While cultural traditions are precious to preserve and protect, claiming that governments must financially support cities is too extreme. Supporting cities, especially through monetary subsidies, can maintain population growth and thus potentially preserve traditions, but turning such support into a govermental obligation relies on many unproven assumptions and contains multiple flaws on both theoretical and implementation levels.

 

First of all, it is not necessarily the government’s job to preserve cultural traditions. Traditions are precious and valuable, but so are food, clean water, unpolluted air, health care and other essential services to human life. In developed countries, it is more appealing to call for the protection of cultural traditions and it is easier to implement. However, in the developing world where many people are living bellow a dollar a day, such a preservation task could prove to be burdensome and impractical. Whether or not its citizens can live healthily is the government’s top priority, which surpasses other unnecessary, although well-inteitioned, tasks that could potentially cost human lives if they were turned into obligations.

 

People indeed hear about traditions, such as folklores and cultural festivals, in metropolitan areas. However, we also hear about innovations and unconventional ideologies from big cities. Traditions, by defintion, are practices and behavior that belong to a group of people who are often senior and old-fashioned. Urbanization or the continuation of urbanization could in fact obliterate traditions through the introduction of novelty. For example, in small villages, writing letters is a tradition to convey thoughts and feelings through handwritten words. Such a beautiful tradition does not exist in big cities where technology has erased the importance of handwritten thoughts through emails, text messages, etc. Thus, supporting big cities financially could lead to the destruction of traditions by funneling money into the hands of technological innvators.

 

Some traditions are good to keep, but one must ask whether we should indiscriminately keep all traditions. For example, some traditions are mysoginous, requiring women to subject themselves as slaves to their husbands. In ancient China, women were required to bind their feet, which would be distorted into “acceptable shapes.” The claim does not describe the criteria by which one would distribute the monetary support, nor does it consider the possibility that such criteria might not even be able to be determined. It is impulsive to call for the preservation of cultures without specifying the selection criteria and to make it a governmental obligation.

 

Protecting cultural traditions has its benefits and, to some degree, potentially deserves governmental support. However, making it into an obligation is impulsive and gratuitous. In developing countries such an obligation might not be practical, and in some cases it could be counterproductive and detrimental to the society if there is no selection in the preservation process. Thus, the claim needs to be nuanced with specifications and qualifications.

Edited September 13, 2016 by thorne
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