She is a bright 17 year old and a victim of public uneducation.
If you have a good Internet connection it can be seen at ... Jay Walking Click on Battle of the Jaywalk All-Stars
She is a bright 17 year old and a victim of public uneducation.
I went to public schools for almost all of my grade-school education and I didn't turn out like that. I'm not defending public schools, but you can't fall back on the victim mentality to explain it away. I believe her problem is that she's apathetic about knowledge and has no real interest in learning. That's the biggest problem with the public schools; they don't instill a love of learning, but rather make it tedious and ultimately seem irrelavant to the students' lives. They don't teach children how to learn, just what to learn according to their woefully inadequate curricula. I learned most of what I now know not through the school, but by reading. There's simply no drive for intellectual edification on the part of public school students; they're not encouraged to think for themselves and seek after knowledge. Because of that I had to find an impetus for learning elsewhere. Luckily I found it, but most in the public schools, and even in many private schools (which often only differ from the public schools in that they allow prayer and discussion of God, and maybe have a few religious courses) never find it. Whenever I hear a student say "I don't read books", I know their school failed them. If you have no desire to become a knowledgeable citizen, then you won't ever become one. It's as simple as that.
So the problem with your great-niece is not that the public schools simply didn't teach her the right things, but they failed to teach her to learn at all. Instead she only cares about the immediate concerns of her own life, which probably include a lot of pop-culture influence and the desire for immediate gradification. I'm afraid when she goes to college she'll be easy prey for the elitist professors who wish only to propagate their own liberal ideologies in the next generation.
By the way, if I may ask, why does your great-niece participate in the "Jaywalking" segment of the Tonight Show? Does she realize she's being made fun of? Is she awarded anything for her participation, or is she merely delighted in the fact that she'll be on national television? I've just always wondered what motivates these people to seek ridicule, as it seems contrary to normal human behavior.