The Standards We Should Have for Our Schools

            A woman sits with her child in a gymnasium with 200 other parents, each one of them has a little slip of paper with a number on it. In front of them stands a man with a bingo cage and a microphone. The cage releases a ball, the man calls out a number, and like the snap of the fingers,  a child’s hopes of a better education just fell through. Each of these parents has entered their child into the lottery to hope for a better education and a better future for their beloved son or daughter. Although a couple dozen spots are available in this prestigious school, these parents decide to take the chance to hopefully see their child succeed in life.

            The film “Waiting for Superman” talks about this real life situation, where parents go against slim odds to hopefully get their child into a good school. These children usually come from very poor areas which have very poor schools. But people have started building charter schools, these public schools have great teachers, an excellent learning environment and a no excuses policy that demands the highest from every student. The only problem with these schools is that everyone wants in, but few spots are available, so children are put into a drawing to be chosen for these schools.

            It is ridiculous for any school to be less than the charter schools. Every child deserves a good education regardless of what neighborhood they live in. We should not have to find great teachers because all teachers should be great. Our teachers are what is building the future of our children, and we should demand the absolute best from every single one of them. We need higher standards for teachers so our children only get the absolute best out of their education.

Prison: The Greatest Classroom in the World

Are basic education skills learned better in a classroom or a prison cell? In “Learning to Read” by Malcolm X, the author describes his own experiences in education and teaching himself more than he ever learned in a classroom. Although Malcolm X was called the most articulate hustler on the streets, the reality was that he was functionally illiterate. He noticed his own illiteracy when he went to prison and wanted to write to his idol, Elijah Muhammad, but he was embarrassed of his use of slang and his incomprehension of larger words. He immediately started reading all the books he could get his hands on, he started reading the dictionary and then he read everything he could in the prison library.

I personally love this story. It is a great story about how one man did not like something about himself and went out to change it. I could not imagine how hard it would be to teach oneself something as crucial as how to read, but he did it anyway. Most people in the United States learned how to read in large groups in the classic classroom setting, and even some of those children that learned how to read grow up to be illiterate adults. What would our world look like if everyone had this desire to be fully literate? How would our schools look? Our world could be a much better place if everyone pushed themselves for an education to be better than what they were yesterday.

Sheeple

            This week we talked about education and empowerment. I read the essay “Against School” by Gatto. In this essay he talks about how schools are training children to be mindless drones, just following rules and obeying orders without question. He thinks schools would be good if teachers cared about their work and students, but until then, school is just a place to learn how to mindlessly obey authority.

            I am not sure how I feel about this. Being homeschooled from Kindergarten to graduation, I never once steeped into a public school class. From what I could tell, school was a place of socialization instead of learning. Students would talk about seeing friends and talking to people at school instead of what they learned. This seemed ridiculous to me because I was always taught to put academics before everything else. In homeschool, you are never caught up in drama or seeing your friends in class. Instead, homeschool is about getting work done and putting friends off until your studies had been completed.

            I somewhat agree with Gatto in the way that some teachers have become complacent in their work, but can we blame them if the students are degrading their teachers 5 days a week? I believe that students are often to blame. Some students do not try to excel in classes, some just want to pass and teachers can tell if they only want to do the bare minimum. This is frustrating to teachers to try to teach complacent students, and it often makes the teacher become complacent as well.

A Girl Named Brandon

We‘ve been talking about how being a different gender or race will impact the kind of opportunity someone can get. Today we focused primarily on transgenders. In Rosin’s essay “A Boy’s Life” she tells the story of a little boy named Brandon that believed he was a girl. Brandon wants to dress like a girl, act like a girl and do everything that a little girl would do. His parents resisted this behavior their son was having, but eventually gave in and gave him puberty blockers and the name Bridget.

            This story really touched my heart. I feel sympathy for the boy that is being pressured to be what society wants him to be instead of letting him be an individual. On the other hand, I know that God made Brandon a little boy for a reason and going against God’s purpose for your life is detrimental to your well-being. I’ve seen a parent punish their son because he was playing with a doll instead of a truck. Many young children go through a phase of being interested in things the opposite sex does and a parent’s reaction to this phase is crucial. Many parents mistake this phase to be a child’s life choice, and vice versa.

            I believe that if parents let their child be interested in something that their sex doesn’t normally do, it helps the child to figure out what they like. I’m not saying to send all young boys to dance school and all young girls to football practice; I’m just saying parents should let their child understand that just because she doesn’t like dolls or the color pink, that doesn’t mean that she’s a boy.

Class

This week we continued to talk about the myth of individual opportunity, focusing a little more on the class system. We read from Mantsios’ essay “Class in America” in which he dealt with the issue of the rich having way too much when the poor have literally nothing at all. I agree with him fully about his stance on the rich having too much because no one needs to earn $14 million a year. I don’t understand why people will pay more than 4x the amount of money for a piece of clothing just because it has a designer’s name on it. People are paying for houses with twice the square footage that they could ever use while just a few miles down the street, we have people living in cardboard boxes.

            We also discussed an essay written by Newman and Chen titled “From the Missing Class”. In this essay they talk about how there’s a class that most people haven’t heard of. This class earns just about the poverty line, but they only make enough to scrape by. These people usually work multiple jobs to try to stay afloat, but to no avail. This class does exist, but is very often ignored, with the attention on the poor and middle class. I personally know this middle class exists because I know people in it. I see these people every day, but hardly anyone acknowledges them. Why do we do this? We need to start taking care of the missing class at least a little, because they may not survive if we do not.

Opportunity or Opression?

This week we talked about the myth of individual opportunity and what it really means to be successful. I honestly don’t believe that there is equal opportunity because not everyone has the same chances or opportunities to rise up in the world. We read an essay called From Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger about a poor uneducated boy suddenly given a chance to move significantly higher up on the social totem pole.

Every once in a while, we hear of a rags to riches story, but how often do they really happen? What had to happen to get us from under class to upper-or even middle class? The cold, hard truth is that we don’t have equal opportunity or decent chances that we can rise in our social standing.

 Let’s take doctors for instance; doctors are classified as a respectable peer group. Doctors earn a fairly good amount of money, they’re respected, and they live pretty good lives. Do we all have the opportunity to become doctors? No, because even though they get paid well, they had to pay a lot of money to go to med school and countless years of other higher education. Some people can’t afford to send their kids to high school. They obviously do not have good chances of becoming doctors if they had to drop out of high school to get a fast food job. Is it possible for them to become doctors? Technically, yes, but the chances are so slim it’s devastating.

My point is that in our current society, there are so many obstacles one has to overcome in life to keep their parent’s social standing, much less go beyond what their parents did. It is totally possible to rise above, but chances are very slim. Chances are out there, you just need to find them, work for them and hope for the best.