Myths And Heroes

I’m going to talk about the notion "Myths and heroes". But first of all, I would like to give a definition of this notion.

« Places » could be important buildings or institutions that represent a certain form of power. For example, Buckingham Palace is a symbol of the British monarchy and the White is a symbol of the American presidency. A place can be also a country or a state. For example, USA is a state which is powerful enough to influence events throughout the world by its culture, its economic and political system.

« Power » is the ability to control others, events or resources; the ability to make things happen despite obstacles, resistance or opposition. This of course leads to conflict between those who have power and those who don’t.

There are many ways to exercise power, so I decided to represent it through the topic of universities because it represents many forms of power.

How are US soldiers portrayed in American films?

First, in the United Kingdom or in the USA, when students go to university, they already know that they have to pay a lot of money for their studies and this causes conflicts between students and government.

In class, we saw a little video which demonstrates the dissatisfaction of students toward the government. They go out the streets to express their discontentment against the government and the rise of tuition fees.

In fact, in the United Kingdom or in the USA, going to university is very expensive.

In USA, annual tuition fees per student, spread, according to the university, 15 000 to 50 000$ whereas in France, tuition fees are approximately 400€.

The Ivy League is a group of eight private universities, like Yale, Princeton or Harvard, in the northern of United States. They are among the oldest and the most prestigious universities in the country, but especially the most expensive. The term "Ivy League" has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions and social elitism. This shows that the universities that offer quality education are those whose tuition fees are the highest.

Many students can pay for the tuition fees of these universities but some of them need to work to earn money to pay for their studies. We have seen this through an article, “For or against the rise of tuition fees?”, published in The Guardian, a Brit-ish daily newspaper. Thanks to this article, we understand that an increase of tui-tion fees is a way to maintain the quality of education in universities, and therefore guarantees at students a stable job in the future. However, this increase extends class divisions and causes a kind of discrimination between students from wealthy families and those from modest families.

So, this is an aspect of the power of the university, the power of money.

Then, most of the students often study very far from their families and live on campuses. In fact, high school students choose to go to prestigious universities to pursue their education in order to find a good job, they probably want to meet new people or just want to enrich their culture.

We have studied this aspect of the notion through a novel entitled Middle Sex. Af-ter his first year at the university,

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