It's amazing to me how many issues from the 18th and 19th centuries are becoming issues again today. In most cases nearly if not 200 years later the same ideas of discrimination and inequality are driving the need for reform.
Now more than religious discrimination we are seeing racial, ethnic, gender and socioeconomic bias. With the abolition of busing student's are now confined to their neighborhoods. They never get to learn about other people from other backgrounds with other experiences. That also created segregation without using the word. The city of Cleveland has close to completely segregated itself. So many neighborhoods are all white or all black or all Hispanic or all Jewish. In this day and time it's sad that most people still feel more comfortable living with "their own people."
It can be seen that schools in poorer, more ethnic areas are not given equal supplies or staff. It perpetuates the continuing cycle of distinction between the education received by rich and poor, black and white, Jewish and Protestant. The system historically was designed to make these distinctions and is now creating the same differences 200 years later.
When will we figure out how to stop the cycle that is ruining our society?
I really feel that this issue has been underground ever since Brown v Board. My high school graduating class had maybe 25 black students out of 800 students total. We never thought that it was the product of racism, but I remember how most of the black students at MHS sat together, and it seems that both sides (black and white) were afraid to cross that boundary. There were some black students who made their way to the upper tracks, but I believe that most of them stayed on the lower track, in which low self-esteem seemed to prevail, and these students were not likely to succeed in this case.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how one can go about solving this problem; busing students students from one city to another does not seem to be affordable, nor convenient for anybody. I think it comes down to the capitalist mentality that "you have your place, I have mine," which sounds great when one is on the higher end of the spectrum, but the sad truth is that most people are not, and schools are unconstitutionally funded. It is damn near impossible to escape poverty, so if blacks, for example, live in a poverty-stricken neighborhood, then they are close to doomed to remain in those conditions. I like what Steven Dorroh said about "everybody has to put their chips back in the middle." If only the country was not run by old, rich, white men who did not really have to work to get where they are.
Latoya, you are correct, the discrimination cycle is still going strong, two hundred years later. So many schools are not equipped with the materials students need such as computers and textbooks. Unfortunately, ethnic schools are usually the first to experience budgeting cut backs with a lack of supplies. As educators, we need to work together to find the solution.
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