Week 2 Readings
#TempleSocEd
With the phrase ‘educational inequality’ at this point in my life, I have come to understand it as a difference in care of education towards different people. What I mean by this is that the care that our teachers put into teaching us varies by who we are perceived to be. My elementary and middle school was in North Philly. Though it was not the worst, it was by far not the best. During my education there I encountered some teachers that literally gave up on us because according to them, we would never make it out the hood. The school was not segregated but it was only black and latinx students. For high school, I went to a school that required good grades to get in. That is when I met white and asian people my age. Because most people had good grades already, the expectations were higher and the care towards the student body as a whole was much greater than I had experienced before. To me my peers from both experiences had the same potential but the lack of care and attention to my classmates in elementary and middle school definitely effected them.
The readings for this week clarified so many things for me. In Prudence L. Carter’s article “Education’s Limitations and its Radical Possibilities”, she mentions that the people who have been victims of some form of oppression in history have a correlation with having a lower economical and social status. Those who have been the oppressors show correlation with much higher economic and social status. She also says how even ‘fair’ college acceptance based on exam scores is actually unfair, since those with more resources will do better than those with less. These two things clicked in my mind while reading. Because as I saw the same potential in all my classmates, the difference was in the amount of resources available. In elementary/middle school the resource of a caring family who knew the value of education was not guaranteed for everyone. As Jesus Cinseros in the article “Students and University Growing Up Together” by Irenee R. Beattie and Roger J. Wyan mentioned, representation of someone who looks like you is important. All my teachers in my early education were white. All the professionals we saw were white. The resources I used were because of my family. Going back to Carter’s article she focusses on difficulties that black men in specific go through and even says there is an unknown factor that continues to pull them back. Throughout all my schooling the girls were always let go for doing the same thing as the guys, but they would get in more trouble. In my early education, I could not compare the black and latin boys to white or asian boys because we did not have any. So, even for us the guys getting in more trouble was normal. The cops were called a few times from casual fights which I now understand that staff and faculty felt more in danger because the guys fighting were black.
Reading Beattie’s and Wyan’s article, I noticed a few things. All the minorities who were first generation college go-ers seemed more fulfilled later in life as well as, more content talking about their school experience at USM. The other people who came from an educated family or were white seemed to have taken college as just another stepping stone in life. In Shika Bindal’s part, she mentions how she found herself in college then got her masters as a way to delay finding a job during the recession baffled me. As a minority and first generation college go-er, I see education as something that I want to become part of and value so greatly. Education is not something easy, at least for me, to simply say that it is a place I happened to find myself. Paying for a Masters degree to avoid having a hard time finding a job is luxury that I hope to give my future kids. In the point of view of a minority, it is important to understand that people like Bindal do exist, just as we exist.
The podcast “1619” hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jone made me think of “educational inequality” in a deeper view. It made me think of it as a retention of the truth to benefit the ones holding it. In the first episode she mentions the Great Nadir which was further suppression of black people that lasted for five decades. That was the first time ever in my life I had heard mention of it. In the second episode she alongside Matthew Desmond talked about Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin. They went further to explain the effects that had on the enslaved people. I learned about Eli Whitney and the cotton gin but never about the negatives to his invention. Withholding this truth and. many others is the worst educational inequality. As they mentioned, American capitalism has not yet shaken the shadows of slavery and this is going to continue the unjust disparities that exist.
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