Poverty and Social Seclusion - Coursework Example

Poverty and social seclusion Introduction Poverty is a very general word and can take many forms possible. According to Gariener, poverty is the denial of choices, opportunity, and the violation of human rights. It entails the inability to participate effectively in society-based schemes. Poverty comprises the feeling of insecure, powerlessness and exclusion either in the households or in the community setting (Gordon, 2006:48). A poverty-afflicted person according to Gariener is susceptible to violence and lives in a fragile environment that lacks opportunity for one’s better life. Social exclusion is broader than poverty as it encompasses both the low achievement from the societal setting and lack of room for free intermingling. It refers to the inability to participate effectively in the, social, political, and cultural aspects of life in a form of alienation and distance from the flow of the society. Therefore, social exclusion is the process by which certain groups of individuals are systematically disadvantaged because of literal discrimination due to differences in ethnicity, race, status, disability, or sexual orientation. Excluded people are just like the poor as they are disadvantaged by their personality as well as residence. They are also locked out by benefits of development (Ridge, 2002:104). The others look down upon the excluded portion of the society and works in bureaucratic powers as well as engaging in violence to perpetuate their superiority position. Peter Townsend Peter Townsend is a professor of International Social Policy who has written widely on economics of poverty. Townsend grew up in a poverty-oriented family that gave him an acute sense of the edges of life (Smith, 2010:98). This force drove him to conduct many researches on matters that affect the poor people. Townsend disagreed with the existing view of poverty and raised hot debates against a purely relative approach of poverty. He suggested that there was a distinction in the peoples view of poverty that was absolute subsistence-oriented as more relativist phenomenon and had clear-cut among the people. Out of his research, Townsend found that about a quarter of the whole population was willing to buy enough of the things they required but not the things many take for granted. He described the phenomenon of poverty as painful and thus he constructed competing conceptualizations, definitions, and measures against exclusion and poverty. Townsend moved from analysis to deeds after gathering evidence on hardships of the poor where he founded the Child Poverty Action Group. This campaign outwitted the president but he did not stop here. He co-founded the disability alliance and worked within the labor party in order to co something practical about poverty. Townsend worked against health inequalities in favor for the whites. He also developed a poverty line rooted in a rigorous social science through cruelty and quirk of fate in the 1970s when Margret Thatcher took the seat. Later Townsend began to look at the topics he had majorly featured in the prisms of human rights. Townsend advocated for the global rights culture as the most promising feature of age (Smith, 2010:102). He dissolved with the British politics a step, which lent him a new optimism. This dissolution step was encouraged by his third wife who was guiding light in the parliamentary joint committee on human rights. Peter Townsend described himself as the head over heels. He died at 81. His demise almost brought to an end the social policy research, which seemed to have unending life. Absolute Poverty VS Relative Poverty Poverty is the state of having no enough money to cater for the basic needs. In other words poverty can be defined as the state of having too little or no money, and few or no material possession. Nowadays economists classify poverty as either absolute or relative. Absolute poverty is the situation where a measurable number of people live below a certain income threshold or are unable to afford minimal standards of basic needs. For instance in the United States of America, absolute poverty has an official basic line set in dollars (Manning, 2004:57). The measure gives the minimum amount of dollars a certain size of family can utilize to purchase goods and service constituting the minimum attainable life. The poverty line in a country is set to measure poverty with respect to cost that can meet the basic human needs. Countries differ in the measure of absolute poverty. This is because the expectations of the general living standards and the minimum necessary amount to meet basic human requirements are relatively higher in the United States. However, the World Bank has set the absolute poverty line as living a life equivalent to two United States dollars or less. According to the statistics done by the World Bank 43% of the worlds population were living below the poverty line in 2002. If only the two dollars a day have to cover all the expenses incurred on daily basis then the individual or family lives in absolute poverty. The World Bank suggests that if most of the people living in a country lead this kind of life then it is obvious that the education level goes down and life expectancy shortens. The absolute poverty line is constant and measures the degree of lowness in income or consumption within a given society (Lister, 2004:34). Relative poverty is a state where some members of the society fall below a certain degree of income with respect to other members of the society. A person has relative poverty if the income he receives is below a certain income threshold. A family could be living in a decent house with all the necessities but they are poor in relative terms. Relative poverty comes where a group of people does not meet the public standards. Measures of relative poverty are the same as those of income equality. Because an increase in income equality means that, the relative poverty goes down (Brown, 2003:75). Relative poverty suggests that if a society changes in a way that hurt high earners more than the low earners, relative poverty decreases. However, in this situation every citizen suffers the more. On the contrary, it is possible to reduce the absolute poverty and increase relative poverty at the same time. Generally, relative poverty measures the living standards of people in a country. Seclusion in Education Education is one of the major components of current child’s development. Access to education for any child is a basic requirement and is of intrinsic significance as well. Conversely, education can become a source of exclusion and there fore carry with it all the intrinsic problems of the vice. Social exclusion is common in education more so if the child does not meet some conventional personality, talent or a physical ability (Savage, 2004:18). Education system can promote exclusion if it does not allow equal participation and access to all the students. Education policies can promote social exclusion among the children an act, which then translates to social exclusion of parents. Currently, most of world countries are on the verge to raise their education standards to international standards. In order to achieve this, the willing countries are focusing on the policy makers of the international league of educational performance. The need for the growth in the current system of education is the competitive pressures in the market places. However, the increasing performance and the education standards lead to further segregation among the student population. The segregation comes where the bright students receive a favored support from the lectures and the average students drag down because all the attention has been diverted from them (KEVIN, 2010:117). According to the new education policies, facilitators generate incentives to best performing schools and neglect the average and the low performing schools. This has a radical effect to the relationship between these sorts of schools, where the poor performing school are secluded for both intrinsic and instrumental considerations. The dynamicity of the education system has a greater impact on the seclusion in education system. The poor performing students have less consideration especially for re-admission this makes them secluded from the education system. This social seclusion due to educational differences hinders the integration and social cohesion. It secludes the abilities of poor but actively participating students. Seclusion in education may take two forms where there is seclusion among the children and seclusion among the adults (Rachelle, 2010:145). Seclusion among the children is due to economic and social status of the parents Education system seclude children in that the poor students from the local schools have no comparison to the privately owned great school. Some promising students from poor backgrounds lack educational motivation from those who nurture them and thus may end up being secluded from students from well of families. Education system also fosters social exclusion among students especially in the way they deal with children with special needs. Most countries have separate schools for individuals who are physically or mentally challenged leading to a form of social exclusion. Other countries have overrepresentation of students with special needs, this creates further barrier to the integration hence social seclusion. Generally, the existence of differentiated schools is a source of social exclusion and is worse if it follows hierarchical basis of forcing students with less educational promise into a lower tie. Germany and the Germany speaking countries have the fame for differentiating students based on academic abilities (Iceland, 2006:218). This differentiation leads to continued poor performance in the bottom tie of students who also feel less valued by the society. Finally, education system can be a source of social exclusion if it fails to educate all the students adequately. School dropouts should be minimized much possible in a country. This is because students who drop out without completing a degree or a diploma are therefore secluded from the intrinsic and instrumental benefits offered to successful graduates. Social Cultural Material Pierre Bourdieu developed a social material concept, which has a direct connection to the theoretical class ideas. He identified three dimensions of cultural classes on basis of economic, cultural, and social bases. These three sources are effective and their ownership is legitimized through mediation of a symbolic culture. According to Pierre social cultural material are resources that are connected in group membership and social net workings. The relationship between actors and their involvement in social relations bring out the sense of cultural materialism (Lister, 2004:49). Cultural material produces collectiveness and enhances the exploitation of potentials. Bureaucratically, cultural materials bring the effectiveness and transforms quantity to quality. It also creates solidarity among persons and mutual recognition. However, cultural materials develop social classes implicated by economic, cultural, and social representation. Cultural capital Cultural capital explains the interdependence between social inequality and the education system. The cultural capital develops a habit and generates meaningful practices. Cultural capital pertains to knowledge and of the dominant conceptual and normative codes that are inscribed in a cultural setting. Individuals positioned at different levels in the society hierarchy use it actively. Cultural capital however serves an important role as a driving force in the educational success (Rigde, 2002: 121). Cultural capital is a principal mechanism in the production and is valorized in the in the field of education. Holding cultural capital in plenty increases the likelihood of receiving preferential treatment from teachers, and generally performing better in the education system. Children from culturally advantaged background have more capital orientation than those from less advantaged families. For in order cultural capital to be transformed into educational success three factors must be taken into considerations. The parents must posses a greater stock by extracting the capital to facilitate the education system. Parents must also invest time and energy in ensuring that their capital is transmitted to their children. The children must always be ready to absorb their parent’s capital and use it effectively to obtain success in the education system (Gordon, 2006:42). Cultural capital has a direct influence on the choice of education a child makes. One can assume either vocational secondary education or upper secondary education according to the cultural capital orientation. Vocational education enables quick access to the labor market and an immediate earning. This may prevent the student from continuing with higher education. Thus, vocational education is educational light. On the contrary, the upper educational is cultural heavy in the sense that it explicitly pursues education to secure the high-status occupations (Smith, 2010:197). The hypothesis thus is that children with high levels of cultural capital see upper secondary education as more attractive to vocational secondary education. In addition, children with high cultural capital tend to have high academic ability. The conclusion is that investment in both cultural capital and academic ability should have positive effects on the probability of the child to choose upper secondary education. Social capital Social capital refers to sociological concept that values relation and the role of corporation and confidence to get collective economic results. Social capital features social organization, trust, norms, and reciprocity that improve the efficiency of a society as well as inclining the networks to do this. Social capital emphasizes on a wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. It creates value for people who are connected and relatives as well (Savage, 2004:51). Social capital is an instantaneous informal rule that promotes cooperation between two or more persons. It is a public good and therefore has under production if utilized by private agents. Social Capital is negative in that it leads to bad results like hate groups and inbred bureaucracies. It comes from spontaneous product of iterated prison dilemmas. According to economists, social capital is generated in an ultimately limited hierarchical source of authority. The stock of social capital can improve under special conditions (Brown, 2003: 181). This is because; social capital is a by-product of religion, tradition, and the shared values. The Government of the specific countries has a major role to play in creation of social capital through education. Education turns the social capital into social rules and norms. Globalization has also been another source of capital in the developing countries. Globalization despite its disastrous effect it leaves new ideas, habits, and practices that awake standard management practices. Summary Researchers have from time to time compared poverty and social exclusion by establishing the co-relation between the two terms. The studies have shown that both terms are quantitative and qualitative oriented. The present study makes it possible to obtain knowledge of the challenges that come about due to poverty and social exclusion (Gordon, 2006:48). Generally, the two terms are related and they are depended to each. However, the being poor does not call for exclusion from the societal structure. More often than not, the poor tend to be secluded from the community activities. Therefore, poverty should not be the basis of social exclusion. Conclusion One of the government(s) task across the globe has been to diminish poverty and social seclusion in the society. The building of a more inclusive globe we must; eliminate poverty and seclusions and emphasize on better jobs, and greater social cohesion (Bartkus, 2009:310). The world countries opt to build a solidarity that will further promote the designation to combat poverty and social seclusion. However, it is hard if not impossible to eliminate poverty and social exclusion completely in a given society. This is because not all people in a given society can, at any rate, acquire the same status cue. Therefore, some elements of either social exclusion or poverty must after all exhibit in the society. It is thus better to be socially excluded than to be poor. The reasons attached to this are the obvious advantage of healthy living. Bibliography Bartee, R. 2007. School Matters. Oxford: Peter Lang. Bartkus, V. 2009. Social Capital. New York. Edward Elgar Publishing. 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