English 111
Mrs. Horne
June 24, 2013
Working at McDonald’s
By: Amitai Etzioni Amitai Etzioni wrote a short story called, “Working at McDonald’s.” As we know most parents want their kids to start working during high school in order to learn responsibility. Etzioni talks about how it is not educational for a teen to start working while in high school, because most teens will work part time at some fast food joint. He states, “But in fact, these jobs undermine school attendance and involvement, impart few skills that will be useful in later life, and simultaneously skew the values of teenagers- especially their ideas about the worth of a dollar.” He is highly against teens working, because many of them stop focusing on school and he has found results to where a lot of teens who work through high school have become high school dropouts. At the end of Etzioni’s essay he points out how teen employment is not educational as most parents think it is. His opinion is that it would better for you to put your child in a sport and let them be active that way, because a sport can also me educational. My opinion on everything Etzioni had to say is that I do feel like he was right about most of what he had to say. When he said that working through high school is not very educational, I do believe he was wrong on that, but at the same time I think he was right. I say that, because I worked through high school and I paid bills and I even paid rent. My parents were showing me how working at Hardees was not going to be able to get me through life with just that little amount of money coming in and I quickly found out that they were right. Fist, I would never want to spend my life working there, but by paying all my bills on my own it really did teach me the value of a dollar. I believe that it can be educational, but it is up to the parents to make it educational for their children. It was definitely educational and taught me a lot. I felt like I could really relate to this story, because when I was a senior in high school I got a full-time job at Hardees. Many of the people I worked with had been there since they had graduated high school, some of which it had been 3 or 4 years since they graduated and they had no intentions of going to college. One of the ladies that was a manager there had been there since she was a sophomore in high school and now she is married with two kids and is 38 years old. When I found that out about all of them it honestly did scare me, because I couldn’t help but think will I be one of them after I graduate. I decided I wasn’t going to let that happen, because I hated the job and you have a choice. If they are happy with where they stand then I am happy for them, but it wasn’t for me. Right after I graduated I signed up for college classes that following fall and here I am now, still giving my best and this following May I will be in the nursing program.
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