Education In America Research Paper

The Role of Education in America Today

Oftentimes, society resorts to mundane repetition simply because we don’t want to rock the boat. The sentiment of Americans seems to be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The idea of fundamentally changing institutions is a radical one, especially to the powers that run our country. In the case of education- schools, school resources, school law, school policy- we are talking about one of the most critical aspects of life and one that is paramount to the future of our nation. Unfortunately, the web of politics, economics and education are intertwined and complicated in our country, and we must dig deeply to uncover the roots of this institution to discover what ails our system of education today. We
must first establish what the role of education is and what it should be in today’s world. This paper will examine the current establishment and its values, and what we can do to improve upon it, with the hopes of providing a brighter future for our children.
School is the first and foremost institution of civilization that is responsible for socializing children on specific skills and values in a society. Currently, the purpose of schooling appears to be the communication the over-arching culture of society, and to preserve said culture throughout future generations. Children learn their culture by acquiring knowledge, beliefs, values, and norms first through family, and then society. As John Dewey opined, “school life should grow gradually out of the home life”. Throughout most of history, parents were considered to be the primary educators of their children. However as we have entered into a more globalized society, the school system has become the glue that holds us all together. Politicians and bureaucrats assert a degree of authority over education that one may have perceived as intolerable long ago. They want control over the thinking of children, and they want to reduce the influence that parents have. There are several phrases that we have that reflect this idea, such as “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” or “Give me control over the child for the first seven years, and I will make the man.” Education has become an arena of political power, and it has influenced the structure and content of education during the primary years of instruction in their lives.
School is no longer serving the role of transmitting knowledge and skills critical to becoming progressive and thoughtful leaders- today’s society expects the school system to impart outdated, adult generated, and implicit social and ethical life lessons, such as drug awareness, social conformity, conflict resolution, and sexual education. All of these imposed morals are set within the parameters levied by today’s conflicting values, diverse morals, and emerging mores. Past traditional agents of socialization that would normally play this role- the church, community and family- have transformed and diversified, leaving the absence of a homogeneous set of social mores, and the school has emerged gradually as society’s binding agent. The centralization of education has presumed that parents are not competent or qualified in imparting healthy or acceptable social skills and values that are compatible with the expectations of society.
Several historians and educational experts assert that education’s role as an institution of social control has existed since its conception.
Nirmala Erevelles writes about the “unruly bodies” that contest the severity and discipline of the educational system, arguing that these approaches and controls reflect those being applied by the prison system today. He highlights the use of strategies, constraints, and activities that were intended to manage those “unruly bodies” and how they are being reflected within schools (Erevelles, 2000). One such approach is that of the routinization of every aspect of the students’ life, as well as the burden of rules and regulations that become the operating model of the institution; schools are designed to be methodically managed in order to ensure order and productivity. Pedro Noguera surmises that schools are also separated into vocational and trade-based schools for lower socio-economically placed immigrants and academic high schools for middle-class students to guarantee the perpetuation of the social order into the workforce. (Noguera, 1995). This reflection between prison and education builds on the notion of an institution whose chief mission is to maintain control over people, “to regiment, control, and discipline the social outcasts” (Noguera,
1995).
Students face hidden segregation in schools today- they are divided according to socio-economic status, aptitude, standardized testing assessments, and behavior with the goal of forming more homogeneous classroom environments.
This results in an overrepresentation of poor African American, immigrant, and Latino children being placed in schools with fewer and insufficient resources, repeating the social order and maintaining the status quo. Jean Anyon of Rutgers University discusses the effects of a hidden curriculum which enables the continuation of social divides. Anyon contends that knowledge and skills leading to social power and achievement (ie. medical, legal and managerial positions) are made available to the advantaged upper class students. In contrast, the focus on these skills is withheld from lower working and middle class children (who are primarily of African American, Latino and first generation immigrant families). A more “practical” and trades-based curriculum is offered, ensuring their placement into manual labor, clerical, and industrial fields thereby continuing their lower status in society. Consequently, a prominent objective of this hidden curriculum within American public schools has been an overriding cultural transmission or instructing students the customs for assimilating in school and society at large. Therefore, hidden curriculum ultimately stands to maintain the status quo, more specifically the prevailing culture and predominant socioeconomic
chain of command. It is this traditionalist favoritism, depicted in articles by Jean Anyon and other educational theorists, which contradict diversity, parity, and social justice. Paolo Freire was famous for his remarks on social divides within the educational system, stating “the oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”
How then, can we promote social justice and equity within our educational system? The answer to this is complex and two major components must be addressed, one being that we recognize oppression within our classrooms, and the other being that we recognize teachers as a means of influence. Understanding how privilege functions, how marginalization follows, how this divide in society is recurring in nature, and how society tends to reject the fact that such injustice is occurring is imperative to improvement. The second crucial concept that must be developed is to recognize how educators can interrupt the continuation of oppression. Helping our next generation of teachers learn how to challenge oppression means implementing strategies to overcome bias regarding race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and culture. Teachers can become change agents through the curriculum administered as well as through specific pedagogical technique that tends to undercut patterns of oppression.