Education with Race and Gender - Essay Example

Education with Race and Gender Human life has undergone significant metamorphosis and evolution and with the passage of time, it has added more to the complexity of human experience. With the blending horizons, borders and identities, many changes have taken place in lifestyles and attitudes but some things have persisted throughout the history and are still present around us, though in different shape ad forms. Discrimination and oppression of humans at the hands of their fellow human beings is one of the malignant tumors that still exist, and have penetrated all walks of life, including education. No matter how enlightened we have become, education is still not free of the concepts of socio=economic class differences and racism. Education is a system of systems. It is actually supposed to build the whole structure and foundation of societies and so the modes of education affect everything in our life in every field. Unfortunately, although with the trends of awareness and consciousness of class and race, people have stood up for their rights they have attained many rights, whereas some people might disagree with this but at least apparently they have. What raises our brows is that the problem still persists around us, and like cancerous tumors it is silently spreading and causing damage to our education system. Racism seems to be "invisible presence" in todays modern societies. When I say invisible presence, it almost sounds like a paradox but this is the reality (Jill 1979). Once upon a time that we only see in history now, racism seemed to be an existing phenomenon and it was not a hypocritical thing. Ironically those times were violent, bad and oppressive but at least people openly did what they believed in. So racism was actually apparent and felt. Now the circumstances have changed, we are no more in a world where we see sign boards like "No Dogs, Negros and Mexicans" but we still hear words like "blackie, coon, jigaboo, shitskin and nigger" (Pilgrim n.p.). This implicit Racism has also penetrated the educational systems and the facts and figures can easily prove that. If we see the classroom environments and the school environments in general, we see a number of examples that prove the existence of this hidden or indirect racism. The immigrant students whether they are from some third world country like India or whether they are from some rich Muslim middle Eastern country are treated like aliens many times. They are not only ridiculed for their strange accents and speaking styles by their fellow students (who are not sternly prohibited to do so) but also sometimes, indirectly by the teachers. Similarly even if we take the example of American black students, they are not treated as just students but as "black or dark skinned" good for nothing students. The facts and numbers in educational records also prove the existence of racism in education. There is a whole phenomenon of "racial achievement gap" in the United States. This gap means the educational disparities that are there in minority students. This gap is proved by the fact that African-American and Hispanic students normally get bad grades, score lower in tests like SAT etc., often drop out of High schools and are less likely to attend colleges (Caldas & Carl 185). Some people want to argue against it and they come up with logical argument and quote examples of prominent so called "colored" successful individuals like the president Obama. But one or a few successful individuals do not count if the majority is lagging behind in such an apparent and huge contrast. So this indicates that some serious racist concerns exist in our educational systems that do not let people from all genders and races compete together at equal levels. Sadly, racism is not the only problem that is affecting education. In a Capitalist society like ours where everything is a matter of "affordability", class also matters a lot when it comes to education. Even the educational system is not free of the class divide, thanks to the public and private school/college divide. The public schools are owned by government while the private schools are owned by private enterprises and so the public schools cost almost the half of private school education. There are many so called "logical reasons" that are presented in favor of the private educational systems. The good old religion is used first of all, when they try to defend special religious or church schools, but then it opens a Pandora box of other private institutions that are established for different goals and they teach what they want to teach, programming the students minds in a specific way. For example there are many private colleges and schools that are only meant for "rich" students and they provide education with almost royal standards to their students and these students then develop that royal attitude and superiority complex and they spend their whole lives with that attitude thus reinforcing class divide. By allowing private education, we have developed two different classes of the society based on class. One is the class of what Marx called "haves" who can study anything, anywhere they want and the other of "have nots" who cannot pay for expensive private education (Ballantine & Spade 211). As education makes the first step of the society, so from the very first step the ways of nation are divided on the basis of money. If a dull student is rich, he still gets to go to a college and gets a degree and if a poor student from a lower streak of the society somehow fails to qualify for college, academic life for him has ended. Similarly a good student who got admission on the basis of his own caliber also ends up holding a degree and the dull, rich student who got admitted because of his fathers overflowing bank account also holds a degree end of the day, thanks to the private education systems (Crompton 127). From all this discussion, we can conclude that although apparently we have reached milestones of success, but we still have a lot to work on when it comes to racism and class divide. Racism and class differences till exist in the society and also in the educational system. The presence of these problems in the educational system is fatal for a healthy society and it divides the society at its very grass root level. References Ballantine, Jeanne H, and Joan Z. Spade. Schools and Society: A Sociological Approach to Education. Los Angeles: Sage/Pine Forge Press, 2012. Print. Caldas, Stephen J, and Carl L. Bankston. Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2005. Print. Crompton, Rosemary. Class and Stratification. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008. Print. Hill, Jane H. The everyday language of white racism. John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Pilgrim, David. "What was Jim Crow." Ferris State University. N.p., 2012. Web. 12 May 2014. Read More