Normal isn't Ideal

Normal isn’t Ideal; normal has to deal with the most common the statistic mean. Most people don’t strive to be just normal. We are a society and culture searching for the ideal. People (women especially) are not looking to be average.  If people wanted to be just average we would all look the same, and live in a very boring world. As humans we strive for more, we don’t want an average job, in an average house, having average health and beauty. We want the ideal. Our society shows us the ideal, the “ultimate” of things. In the Davis reading from Tuesday there is a sentence that relates to theUnitedStates society in a way “if individuals citizens are not fit, if they do not fit into the nation, then the nation body will not be fit” the paragraph goes to say that this is false by asking if “as if a hunchback citizenry would make a hunchback nation”. Well I believe the first statement to be true in a way. If in the United States for example all the citizens wanted to do was to be “normal” or AVERAGE, then the nation would not be where it is today. If on state testing and schools all the government wanted was to be average among other nations then there wouldn’t be programs like NCLB or Race to the Top. The country and world feed off of the notion that to be the best we need to reach for the ideal goal.  The country wouldn’t a market economy without the vision of the ideal. What would happen to the buyer economy if people didn’t measure themselves to the ideal and just measured themselves as normal?  People would buy new products or have any motivation to be better. People would be content with normal (the mean). Having the ideal makes us as students and people motivated and attempt to be perfect and fit into the mold. If we as people were content with normal we would be a very stagnant world.

 -Sarah Fiorella