QUOTES FROM "STILL SEPERATE..." : PART 2

"the economic needs of a society are hound to be reflected to some rational degree within the policies and purposes of public schools."

"Very few people who are not involved with inner-city schools have any real idea of the extremes to which the mercantile distortion of the purposes and character of education have been taken or how unabashedly proponents of these practices are willing to defend them. "

"Corporate leaders, when they speak of education, sometimes pay lip-service to the notion of "good critical and analytic skills," but it is reasonable to ask whether they have in mind the critical analysis of their priorities"

QUOTES FROM STILL SEPARATE, STILL UNEQUAL: AMERICA'S EDUCATIONAL APARTHAID

"One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation."

"Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation fifty years before—and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past."

"School systems themselves repeatedly employ this euphemism in describing the composition of their student populations. In a school I visited in the fall of 2004 in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, a document distributed to visitors reports that the school's curriculum "addresses the needs of children from diverse backgrounds." But as I went from class to class, I did not encounter any children who were white or Asian—or Hispanic, for that matter—and when I was later provided with precise statistics for the demographics of the school, I learned that 99.6 percent of students there were African American."

REVISION OF LAST POST (JEAN ANYON)

Because I don’t study with New Books I won’t get a job?

In today’s society we are faced with many obstacles including our education, and how it influences our future. In Jean Anyon’s essay “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”, we are shown how different social classes coincide in statistical evidence that the higher in class the better future we have. Social class is essential in determining your future because the amount of money you have impacts the quality of learning you receive because it influences the materials that are available to you. Also, it impacts the type of teacher you are provided with, and the way you are taught.

The amount of money you have affects the educational material you’re able to use. The quality of the materials that you use impact key components in your learning style. For example, coming from a middle class home I used textbooks to read my text and study. My friend who had went to a prestige school was given an iPad to download the book onto there. The IPad included many different options that an obviously text book does not. Which are highlighting and inserting personal comments digitally, the ability to search a sentence or word in the internet, and being able to be more digitally connected about the information. Options like these make learning much more interactive and flexible to your learning capabilities.  In the text Anyon states when referring to the affluent professional school “the teachers ask the student to grab the geoboards from the back and to grab rubber bands…” (6) And when referring to a working class school states “the children were told to copy the steps as notes.”(3) Having interactive material to learn with makes the class easier to learn and provides more motivation.

            Furthermore, social class influences the teacher you’re provided with and how you’re taught. The way you’re taught and the style of learning you’re provided with impacts your attitude towards the class.