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Education In Public Education

Decent Essays

Education has undergone many rhetorical and definitional changes since its creation; the explicit purpose of teaching the masses, particularly in the framework of public schooling, has varied from culture to culture. At its core, though, the aim is simple: to efficiently construct productive members of a society. This effort has to encompass so much of the values of said societies that it becomes impossible for educational institutions to avoid the influence of larger institutions. Within these constraints comes the effect of social reproduction. This institutional byproduct of education rooted in societal values guarantees that students who come from lower income backgrounds are fated to experience this existence as adults, whereas students from higher income families have the advantages to follow in the footsteps of their parents. Without deeply studying and working to reverse social reproduction, our current educational system is the story of history repeating itself.
In the humble beginnings for early American understandings, public education was designed to create productive citizens in part by mollifying any potential class conflicts. According to Horace Mann’s conceptions of public schooling for the country, providing a uniform education meant providing equal opportunity for all. If the lower class thought that their students had the opportunity to succeed like the rich did, they would be much less likely to rebel against the systems currently in place (Brick 2005).

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