The Culture of Education
The American Education System is terrible. From increasing segregation in New York, to unimportant history taught in text books, and underneath all of it, an attitude of alienation shared by both teacher and student. While the legal aspect of the overall problem with education in the USA (increasingly segregated school districts, lack of after school programs, poor quality of facilities, etc…) will require the coordination of forces from outside the school system, the greatest change that must occur within it is the way that teachers are taught about students. In America the idea that intelligence is connected to racial make-up is still quite prevalent, with teachers using it as an excuse to explain why minority students (typically black American and Latino American) do poorly in traditional school environments. In the reading of author Gloria Ladson Billings, the issue of this unconsciously continued attitude of alienation is clearly illustrated when she talks about training teachers in a predominately black school, “I once had a student who was working in a school with a 100 percent African American population. She described it as a “diverse” school setting. I corrected her and said, “No, you’re in an all-black school.” (P-2) This balance between recognizing that different ethnicities experience living in the US differently, and ensuring that one remembers that “race” does not separate us as human beings.
As it stands in contemporary America, the idea that skin color separates citizens of the USA into different “cultures” that make it hard for someone of one skin color to related too and work with someone of another color. This idea is, of course, preposterous. Genetically speaking human beings are not affected in their DNA by the color of their skin by more than 0.1%. Alan Goodman tells us, “Genetically, scientists later confirmed, individuals in the species homo sapiens are about 99·9 percent alike. Racial categories are not biological realities, but social constructions.” (P-5) This difference is no where near large enough to justify the terrible things people have done to one another because they look unfamiliar. Gloria outlines the problem with teacher education, “…teacher education students learn nothing about culture, they use it with authority as one of the primary explanations for everything from school failure to problems with behavior management and discipline.” (P-1) This notion that culture is responsible for the poor performance of minority students is partially true, but not in the way that teachers generally think. The common belief is that the culture of black Americans is one of rebellion, not doing their homework, having trouble with authority, generally being indifferent to the system. However, it is not that black culture keeps black Americans down, but rather that the history of how black Americans have been treated in this country is still influential in how the culture of America treats it’s black citizens. Again Gloria gives us an example of alienation between teachers and students, “Overwhelmingly, the students choose a student who is unlike them in racial, ethnic, and gender categories. Over and over students tell me about their problems dealing with African American boys.” (P-1)
The sad reality is that, “We lack complex understandings of how individual, family, community, school, and societal factors interact to create school failure for some students.” (P-3) Our teacher education system is not designed with the intention of helping to integrate the most discriminated of the American population into the system. Neither our educators nor our students are versed in understanding “the Other”, and subsequently our society as a whole suffers. This lack of knowledge about the experiences we all go through fosters the desire for racial isolation in our communities, but this segregation is the very cause of so much of the inequality that plagues the US today. In the book “Everyday Anti-Racism” the last two authors in our reading provide a passage that outlines the fear to speak about race in the classroom. “Too often participants are afraid of offending, appearing angry, or sounding ignorant in conversations about race and fall silent, allowing their beliefs and opinions to be misinterpreted or misunderstood. Many beliefs concerning race are based on misconceptions.” (P-21) It is imperative that we insist as Americans, that connection between people of varying life experiences is essential to the overall well being of our nation. Schools must continue to strive for desegregation, policies need to be implemented that will not keep down vulnerable sections of the population.
