Analysis Of Doing Nothing Is Something By Quindlen

In the 1997 article, “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals” by David Labaree, Labaree describes three goals that have been at the core of educational conflicts over the years. The first goal mentioned is democratic equality, which is meant to create good citizens and enable educational access to all. The second goal is social efficiency, which creates workers and is viewed by taxpayers and employers as a goal to prepare students for market roles. Lastly is the third goal of social mobility, where individual success for attractive market roles is the main purpose. This primary goal of education has been ever fluctuating. The argument of this essay is that social mobility has now triumphed over democratic equality and social efficiency as the primary goal of education due to parents. This view of social mobility by parents is negative to due its numerous consequences, significantly the growing disparity between the wealthy and the underprivileged, and additionally, the health of children, their behavior, and the degree to which they learn educational material are all affected.

Julie Lythcott-Haims explains to us all what a perfect child is; straight A student, fabulous test scores, gets homework done without parents asking them to do it… She has the right idea, the right mindset of a parent, every parent wants their child to succeed in life. The way that parents are parenting their children is messing them up. They don’t have a chance to become themselves, they are too focused on whether they did good on that test that they were stressing about for a week, they are too worried about getting the best grade to be able to get accepted into the biggest name colleges around. The parents become too consumed with hovering over their children making sure that they are doing flawlessly in school, the parents are directing their every single move they make. The children then began to think that their parents love comes from the good grades. Then they start making this checklist; Good grades, what they want to be when they grow up, get accepted into good colleges, great SAT scores, the right GPA, the jock of the sports team.

Next, When students fail in school, teachers don’t bother to care nor to help because it was the student's decision to fail, although having parents jump in to the students problems; no matter what they will always support because the parents want the best out of him/her student. Also, parents look out for their child in the education challenges that gets to them. For example, Karther, Diane E. Lowden, Frances Y states,”Despite their own low school achievement, many parents value education, believing it to be a pathway to success for their children”(41). Parents are good reason why student tend to succeed in school after getting in the way of struggling by failing a class. One good reason that students will tend to focus in school and get a good passing grade is getting told by parents at home to do homework if not value electronics gets taken away. Teachers have limited control of students lives, so

There’s an old saying that goes, “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present”, by Alice Morse Earle. The world has become a place taken for granted. Humans are beginning to wish they could live in the past, while others just want to skip over to the future but what ever happened to living right now? Or living in the moment? In the story, “The American Family”, by Stephanie Coontz, she discusses why so many individuals believe American families are facing worse issues now than in the past. She discusses how in the previous years, it was far worse and explains why those people are wrong to assume they are facing worse problems now. In addition, Robert Kuttner and his text, “The politics of family”, supports Coontz’ argument about the dilemmas facing the turn-of-the-century American families and gives the resolutions to those problems; such as talking out problems, women having the right to walk out of unsatisfactory marriages, and lastly, the emancipation for women.

How does parent involvement affect children’s academic success in low socioeconomic areas? Does socioeconomic status and parental involvement play a major role in the academic success of teens? Many reasons can contribute to the low level of success of some teens. The thrilling memoir, The Other Wes Moore, provides readers with two scenarios, one resulting in success, and one resulting in failure. Teen’s who are raised in low socioeconomic areas, and who have a minimal level of parental involvement, tend to perform poorly in academic settings.

Parents believe their kids are too young and immature to make a decision by them selves, therefore they pressure their kids into attending college believing it is the best thing for them. The author does not agree with these actions and thinks that students should decide for themselves whether or not they want to continue their education. If students feel that college is not for them, they should not stay there just because somebody expects them to. Furthermore, she states that if everyone got a higher education everybody would be on the same intellectual level, and there would be no difference in people.

Over time, men and women have changed. A man’s “life script” would have included providing and protecting his wife and children. For a woman, her “life script” included taking care of the children, cooking, and cleaning. However, today the roles for men and women in their twenties have evolved into something different. The author shows this transition by stating that men “balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor,as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games.” Also, research has shown that the age of marriage for men has inclined to thirty. Women are now taking on new roles, such as being the financial provider along with the previous care giving

In roughly 95 million middle-class American homes the notion of making last minute plans to share quality time with family and friends is challenging. With their priority for leisure time being focused on their children’s futures, making plans often involves two to four weeks advance notice. However, 200 million working-class and poverty level families accommodate those last minute plans with ease. Parenting styles in American families is what Annette Lareau addresses in Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Lareau identifies middle-class families as concerted cultivators, mothers and fathers that dominate their children’s lives with established, controlled and organized activities intended to give them experiences that

The average age that a person has kids is around the age of twenty-nine (Bates). So not only does one have to balance bills, focus on a career, they could also have to take care of a life. To be fully prepared to enter the real world, an individual must basicly have there life planned out as soon as highschool. It is very hard to put these heavy choices on a kid as young as thirteen years of age. A decision a person makes on what they do affects them for the rest of their life, so why make a decision that is so heavily weighed, be even allowed to be chosen by someone so juvenile. Many teens are worried about gossip, relationships, sports, and social status. College is just something a highschool thinks of usually around junior year, or early senior year, even senior year where a high school student makes their decision about what colleges to apply to, or accept to get into; they are also distracted with SAT’s, ACT’s, Friday night lights, grades, and school dances like prom or cotillion. Being sidetracked by all these factors and many more a logical decision can not be made without taking even more time to not just double check a decision, but triple check, or four times or more. An individual can never be too sure about

Living in a household with western style parenting, I disagree with Amy Chua. Yes, your parents want you to do better but most do not run and blame it on the school or school system.

The new century, as well as the individuals that experience it, had presented many challenges, as terrorism, wars and economy. These result to be evidence that society just like a river, is in constant movement and change. We may not attempt to fully understand its factories and phenomenons, but instead develop a sense of conscience and constant learning from our own culture. As result of this changes, people’s relationships at home as well s work suffer significant modifications that did not result convenient for the standard family in america. The definition and structure of family changed besides the requirements and expectations in the different professions and jobs that exist in human communities.

She says this because parents don’t need to have a fancy education or provide their child with endless enrichment activities, all they need to do is talk. Where ELL parents might struggle with this is in a language gap. They will be able to converse with their child in their native language but might struggle with speaking to them in English. If the parents struggle with their English, they won’t be able to help with homework or reading assignments and might begin to feel they can’t help their child in this setting. By schools providing things like parent classes to help with English proficiency or continued education, schools can help bridge the gap between the student’s home and school lives and allow parents to be more involved.

The families in America are steadily changing. While they remain our most valued and consistent source of strength and comfort, some families are becoming increasingly unstructured. In the past, the typical family consists of a working father, a stay at home mother and, of course, well-rounded children. Today, less than 20 percent of American families fit nicely into this cookie cutter image. American households have never been more diverse. Natalie Angier takes stock of the changing definition of family in an article for the New York Times.

Students from all over the United States are told all through their life that they need to attend college if they ever want to be successful, however, this is far from the truth. Often schools are culprits for driving students to attend money driven colleges, in other cases it is family. While schools all too often make the push on students to continue their schooling, parents can cause the same situation, as they may not have a degree and be working a low-paying factory job. Now kids already don’t want to be like their parents when they get older, so seeing them suffer in poverty or barely above the poverty line can cause some dissatisfaction, further seeking a degree to live a life that they never got. What many

Parent’s goals are to their children become successful learners so that children can do extremely well as an adult. Regardless if parents receive their high school diploma, parents still talk to their children about the importance of education (Thao, 2009).