Chapter 6: Education

Brown v. Board of Education:

1954 - The Supreme Court overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, declared that racially segregated facilities are inherently unequal and ordered all public schools desegregated.

Plessy v. Ferguson:

A 1896 Supreme Court decision which legalized state ordered segregation so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal; in other words, established the doctrine of "separate but equal." As a result, the decision upheld Jim Crow laws in the South, led to increased discrimination against African Americans; later overturned by Brown v. Board of Education.

Pedagogy of Liberation:

A pedagogy of liberation centered around the principles for social change and transformation through education based on consciousness raising and engagement with oppressive forces.

Education Today:

A study by researchers at Georgetown University found that while a college degree still provides a material boost to lifetime earnings, 10 years after graduation, the alumni of elite institutions are out-earning their peers from other colleges and universities. It is often by a significant amount, and male college graduates still earn much more per year then female graduates across the board. With this in mind, rising tuition costs and a weak job market have contributed to these inequalities, but they did not create them.

Early African American Education (Separate but Equal):

After the emancipation of enslaved Africans in 1863 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, the period known as Reconstruction began. The nation faced four challenges in "reconstructing" the South after slavery and the Civil War: 1) To rebuild the crucial southern economy on free labor instead of slave labor. 2) To change the south so that it could more effectively rejoin the US. 3) To integrate the freed Africans into US society. 4) To protect the freed Africans from harm.

Atlanta Compromise: (Early African American Education - Separate but Equal)

An 1895 address by Booker T. Washington that urged whites and African Americans to work together for the progress of all. (In other words, this was an 1896 Supreme Court decision which legalized state ordered segregation so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.) Delivered at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, the speech was widely interpreted as approving racial segregation.

Education as a Conversion Tool: (Education as a Socialization Process, Theories of Education)

As societies spread across geographic and cultural space over time, whether through migration, conquest, colonialism, or imperialism, their members encounter others who are different from them in many ways. We can clearly see the role of education as conversion by looking at those who wrestles with their role as colonial subjects (or internal colonial subjects within the US; some scholars consider Natives, Africans, and Latinos, for instance, to constitute domestic, or internal colonies within the US, providing an exploitable workforce from which labor power can be extracted, and who continue to try to reclaim aspects of their social and cultural structures and identities.

Gender (and Education, Continued):

Boys and girls experience schooling very differently, such as in the following: - Girls do worse on standardized testing, yet get better grades than boys. - Girls' behavior in school, lines up more with the "model student's expectations". - Girls show more interest in school than boys. - In contrast to before, high-schoolers are now taking more similar classes. In general, girls engage much more fully than boys in many aspects of school, one reason, of which has to do with (toxic) masculinity. Furthermore, in the wake of the founding of the BLM movement, the report, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected reviewed: - Black girls are subject to larger achievement gaps and starker consequences of punishment. - At-risk girls describe zero-tolerance schools as chaotic environments (More on Pages: 219 to 220)... Clearly, the data shows that race and gender together create the experience of schooling different for Black girls...

Who Goes to School? (Continued):

Furthermore in the school year of 2013-2014: - The average teacher-to-student ratio was 16.1 to 1. - 19.5 million students (ages 18 to 24) were enrolled in 7,253 Title IV institutions of post-secondary education. In addition, from 2011-2012: - Whites lead the highest percent of high school graduates, 18 to 24-year-olds enrolled in college, and earn a bachelor's degree or higher. - Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and other races were increasingly less likely to graduate from high school, enroll in college, and attain a bachelor's degree or higher. Each of these statistics tells the stories of students of color, and how they face many obstacles in their endeavors to gain doctoral and professional degrees; as their pathway to higher education is interwoven within the matrix of race and racism.

Sexual Minorities (and Education):

In 1999, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) began conducting the National School Climate Survey, which documented the harassment, and verbal/physical assaults on sexuality, gender, and gender expression, including transgendered students. The report shows that all LGBT students experience verbal and physical harassment, as well as LGBT POC who experience microaggressions on top of that. The several solutions for these problems are included on page 221, which include: - Increased opportunities for GSA...

Alternative Educational Movements and the Future of Education:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Paulo Freire, an educator from Brazil, whom we met earlier, sought to reveal the oppressive foundations of capitalist educational systems, particularly in colonized countries, while simultaneously calling for the construction of *pedagogy of liberation* where education can free people, not confine them. As Freire explains, "The struggle begins with men's recognition that they have been destroyed."

Who Goes to School?:

Many children in the United States begin their structured experience of education soon after birth, in institutionalized and organized childcare. In 2010, there were about 20 million children under the age of 5 in the US, and with this in mind: - Of these 20 million, 43.2% attended organized daycare or preschool facilities, and the rest were under the care of parents, grandparents, siblings, or other relatives. - Black and Latino children were a little less than half as likely as White and Asian children to attend preschool. - Mothers with only high school educations were five times less likely to enroll their children in preschool than were mothers with college degrees.

Social Class (and Education):

We are born into the matrix and gendered, raced, and located in our positions in the socioeconomic structure. The US is the only nation that funds its public schools primarily on the basis of local and state, not federal, tax revenues. Given our narratives about the role of education in skills acquisition and social mobility, we should ask, first, whether if the payoff is worth it. Many students see a college degree as a requirement for landing a decent-paying job; however, this may not be as true as it appears, especially for Black and Latino students...

The Shaping of the Matrix of the US Education:

What does it mean to be educated? If you accept the arguments of C. Wright Mills, you may conclude education functions to maintain the social hierarchy by creating workers, who sustain the wealth of the elite. If you listen to a successful professional, they may share that education is a socialization process fundamentally about acquiring skills. If you listen to the framers of US democracy, such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, the purpose of education is to foster the critical thinking necessary for citizens in a free society. If you listen to middle-class parents paying their child's way through college, they may say education is the way to move through the socioeconomic ladder. Regardless of these anecdotes, the truth is that the institution of education will not provide each of these beliefs equally towards each student, as race and class exemplify the reality it is not equal for all.

Malala Yousafzai:

She stood up against the Taliban in Pakistan demanding equal education for female students. They shot her for this when she was 15 years old, but she survived. She has become known around the world for her bravery as a young girl who fought for the importance of education, worldwide, particularly for the minorities who need it most. Her experience reminds us that we still have far to go for the gains on the education of girls and women, fundmentally.

Social Cohesion:

Social bonds; how well people relate to each other and get along on a day-to-day basis.

Education as a Human Right:

This brings us full circle; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines education as a human right. We need alternative models to civics, in political science, social science, history, as taught in our schools and universities. As part of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the UDHR, the UN General Assembly declared 2009 the International Year of Human Rights Learning. Throughout the year, the General Assembly heavily promoted activities to strengthen and deepen human rights learning on the basis of the principles of universality, constructive international dialogue, and cooperation, with a view toward enhancing the promotion and protection of all human rights.

Education, Race, and Intersectional Realities:

Each year since 1970, the US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics has published a report titled The Condition of Education, a recent edition of which we have referenced and will continue to reference in this chapter, along with other sources that together represent the institution's official presentation on the developments and trends in education.

Education as a Site of Class Construction: (Education as a Socialization Process, Theories of Education) (Includes the definition of *cultural capital* and examples of it.)

Education has consistently perpetuated class inequality, going back as far as the earliest social structures of literacy. The notion that education provides society and its members with the academic and cultural knowledge necessary to function is encouraged by the dominant classes in most contemporary societies. One interpretation of this belief is that if you do not receive an education, you are not a full-fledged member of society. *Cultural capital* consists of the cultural resources, the meanings, codes, understandings, and practices, that individuals can accumulate ant utilize to exchange for goods in a social or economic market, which exists in three forms (Pierre Bourdieu): 1) Embodied personal characteristics such as the ability to see, feel, and think about the world in ways acceptable to the dominant class. 2) Physical objects like books, movies, music, and clothing, recognized by the dominant class as worthy of attention. 3) Institutionalized recognition, a college degree, for instance, which is an accepted credential that determines the graduate's worth in the job market.

Imagining New Educations:

First, imagine a school wherein Freire's words, the "teacher-student" (because teachers are always students) begins with the notion that "student-teachers" (students are seen as having experience and insight to offer their teachers) bring with them specific experiences based on their places within the matrix. Second, the schools are transformed into local spaces for the reception, discussion, and distribution of the culture and knowledge of marginalized communities, in order to break down dominant ways of knowing and reconstruct a language of hope. Third, based on this radical reimagining of education, schooling, curriculum, and the school, teacher-students and student-teachers learn to change their views of themselves and their relationship to the world. Fourth, education is socially contextualized and aware of power, as well as grounded in a commitment to an emancipatory world, a world where freedom, dignity, and self and communal determination are central, as well as history-making, processes whereby we see ourselves as being the change we want to see in the world. Fifth, student-teachers understand that they possess the right to speak, to disagree, to point out alterations, and to call for a renegotiation of the curriculum.

Socialization:

The process whereby members of a society are taught that society's dominant roles, norms, and values.

Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District (1947)

In which, the Court declared unconstitutional the segregation of Mexicans and Mexican American students into separate schools.

Native American Boarding Schools:

They were required to speak English, convert to Christianity, and become educated in the ways of Western civilization, as children of different tribes were mixed together, boarded with local white families, against their will, and subject to ethnocide and forced assimilation, essentially similar to concentration camps.

Human Capital Theory (Education as Skills Acquisition): (Education as a Socialization Process, Theories of Education) (Includes the definition of *the apprenticeship model of education* and *human capital*.)

Many high schools, colleges, and universities aim to give their students the "skills they need to compete in the global economy" or for membership in the workforce in general. This involves the theory of *the apprenticeship model of education*, where a master craftsman would take on one or more apprentices to train, passing on the skills the apprentices would need to eventually fill the master's role. The skills acquisition function of education is echoed throughout many communities today in the common belief that education provides the skills we need to engage productively in society... This provision of skills that are exchangeable within a social structure, or market, for other forms of captial, has been described by economists, sociologists, and educational researchers alike, as the development of *human capital*: the changes in persons that bring about skills and capabilities that make them act in new ways.

Social-Functional Theory: (Education as a Socialization Process, Theories of Education)

One of the primary theoretical stock stories of education is the narrative of education as socialization, which rests on the idea that schools socialize students. For French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, education's purpose was to instill a sense of "morality" and "cohesion" within individuals.

A Short History:

Regardless of type or level of schooling, the institution of education in the United States has almost always been the site of conflict, debate, and confrontation over access, meanings of education, and what is taught, why, and to whom (as well as whose knowledge is noteworthy as worth having).

Critical Pedagogy:

The concept that emerged from the work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970). It guides students to identify real-life problems, reflect on them, gather information, share it with peers, and collectively find solutions. Through this process, they become active learners and participants in and of their own reality.

School Desegregation:

The idea of elimination of the separation of races in public schools; racial integration, however, the schools were nothing in the name of separate but equal.

Introduction to Chapter 6, Education:

The nation's only Catholic Black college, New Orleans' Xavier University charges less than $20,000 a year for tuition and sends more Black students to medical schools than any other educational institution in the United States. This is seen in the case with Pierre Johnson, who arrived from a Chicago high school, lacking the knowledge that his White peers gained, and all of their advantages. This story is part of the larger, concealed story that educational opportunities are not the same for all, and this is especially seen intersectionally.

Education as Means of Creating Workers: (Education as a Socialization Process, Theories of Education)

While we generally assume, based on our stock stories about education, that we need an education in order to get a job, an alternative narrative focuses on the idea that schools exist to create, not educate, workers for the labor force. To consider this possibility further, think about the general rules from school that we learn from a very early age and replace the roles with factory instances, it is evident that it mimics the pulse of the factory. Additionally, as more people have attained higher levels of education, we would expect income inequality to be reduced, but it has worsened over time. Overall, the narrative that schools create workers for the bourgeoisie helps to partially account for this.

Education as Citizen Machine:

While we may like to imagine that education allows individuals to learn to question reality, there is abundant evidence that it carefully constructs that reality for a specific purpose and with certain goals in mind. Social scientists have been interested in this concealed narrative for education for some time; the primary research approach is often called *critical pedagogy*: "Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or becomes the practice of freedom, the mans by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." Students of the institution of education, therefore, must pay very close attention to the old sociological adage that things are not what they seem. Throughout its history, education in the United States has been the subject of continuous efforts at reform by the federal government. At this time of writing, it is unclear what Trump's educational platform will be; however, if his choice for secretary of education, is any indication, one of the central components of the platform will be "school choice".

Gender (and Education):

Worldwide, according to UNESCO's most recent World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, only a handful of nations have achieved gender parity in education; they are most countries of European Union, Indonesia, the Russian Federation, a few South American countries, Canada, and the US. In their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Kristof and WuDunn observe that "education is one of the most effective ways to fight poverty... [It] is also a precondition for girls and women to stand up against injustice, and for women to be integrated into the economy." A living illustration of this hope is by Malala Yousafzai.