What Is A Reflection Of The Culture Of Education?

“School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers.  School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently” (Gatto 670).  In the present day school system, students are becoming more of products of an institutionalized school system

There are many controversies that american public education system does more harm than good. In “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto and “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by Jean Anyon, explains how school education destructively impacts us. Gatto states his experience as a public school teacher and why he “just can’t do it anymore”. He was tired how the schooling was programmed. He argues how school system are affecting students to be more like “childlike” citizens. Also, Anyon demonstrates her research on how there are many different kind of education depending what “class” you were. She informs us that there is an inequality in “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work”. Both authors depicts the reality and truth, that some people are unable to see. As a student, I’ve also experience this and support how school depicts how we are in the future. Moreover, there are many representations that explains why the american public education systems does more harm than good.

Antonia Darder sets a language in Culture and Power in the Classroom that critiques the traditional American educational system while challenging teachers to a new thinking of culture and diversity in the classroom. Using the groundings from several theories, theory and resistance, regimes of truth, and theory of hegemony, she set the platform of the hidden curriculum that is valued in traditional public education. She seeks to use several theoretical frameworks to create a bicultural critical pedagogical approach, which links education to impactful politics. In Culture and Power in the Classroom, Antonia Darder makes is clear that education matters, but yet more importantly that all students matter in their educational experience. As educators there needs to be awareness and consciousness of the hegemonic forces of race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and/or ability shape that inferiority within students. Cultural hegemony is so natural, that even in the classroom students are immune to the shoddiness of living within the realms of the dominant culture.

Ever since its inception, human civilization has been run by a pecking order; a small group of elitists on the top of the chain of command dictate the social norms for the remaining individuals on the antithetical end of the spectrum. Individuals with traits outside these norms are ostracized and looked down upon by the hierarchy. Cathy Davidson’s, Project Classroom Makeover, promotes the use of customization in the education system to accommodate every students’ learning habits over the current use of standardization and curriculum based teachings. On the other hand, Karen Ho’s, Biographies of Hegemony, is about how one’s environment is engineered by institutions, which in turn establish hierarchies who set standards for society. However, Son by Andrew Solomon describes how horizontal identities, traits influenced by peer groups that separate individuals from their families, are seen as abnormalities and those with such identities are on the bottom of the said hierarchy. Based on Davidson’s, Solomon’s, and Ho’s works, individualism does into question because society forces individuals to conform to the standardized norm in which they are not allowed to have unique identities.

People’s identities are formed by what they hold valuable, at a young age, however, those value can be greatly influenced by his/her surrounding society. In all three essays, Cathy Davidson, “Project Classroom Makeover”, Karen Ho, “Biographies of Hegemony” and Susan Faludi, “The Naked Citadel” the authors share their personal experiences with how different educational institutions operate and to what extent they value and echo their surrounding society. It is evident that those institutions can shape, or in the least influence, their attendees' identities by injecting the surrounding society's belief and influence onto them.

Socioeconomic status plays a key factor in the type of education a child receives today and ultimately functions to keep individuals in the class they are born into. Those who are part of the lower class receive the bare minimum in education with the end goal being blind obedience, while the upper class is educated in a way that encourages self-regulation, individual thought, and creativity. These vast differences in education are no mistake and are put in place for overall control.

The book ‘My Freshman Year; What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student’ has become a bestseller and is has become a source of policy inspiration for college administrator. The book details the findings of a professor who goes back to college and lives as a freshman. She registers at Northern Arizona University and conducts her study as a part of the student body. She lives in a dorm and takes a whole course load. The result is that she is able to attenuate student issues in a way no other anthropologist can or has done. The author’s exposure as Professor Cathy Small adds to the intrigue of the book. As with any other, she has a distinctive method, and there are several ways in which she establishes her position and power. The paper shall interrogate those methods using readings by Barbara Johnstone and Charles Murray.

There are all kind of feeling that are transpiring throughout my mind when think of the term cultural analysis. In executing the communication concepts of African American cultural, I found that the Chinese and African American cultural are strongly tied to their beliefs and family concepts. I define myself through my culture as being an African American male, thought out religions, education, and family is very essential in my culture. Also, being limited to making lifestyle changes, and the different ways we communicated with each other are how I define myself through my culture. Being African American my perception of my culture is that we as a community are high in health, crime, education, and public housing, which implies welfare, government assists, black on black crime, and drug abuse. Being an African American, other cultures have a better chance at getting better jobs, education, and opportunities in life.

As a student just out of high school, due for at least four more years of higher-education, the problems in education addressed during Chapter 8 are especially pertinent to my own life. However, that’s not to say that the problems in the education system aren’t important on a society-wide level as the quality of education is a major indicator for a society’s level of development and by extension the knowledge and to a degree the values of its citizens. The rhetorical question the textbook asks is a good summary of the flaws of the education system, “education is often claimed as a panacea – the cure-all for poverty and prejudice, drugs and violence, war and hatred, and the like. Can one institution, riddled with problems, be a solution for

In this course, students identify, explore, and question prevailing assumptions about education in the United States. The objectives of the course are for students to develop both a deeper understanding of the system’s historical, structural, and philosophical features and to look at schools with a critical eye. We examine issues of power and control at various levels of the education system. Participants are encouraged to connect class readings and discussion to personal schooling experiences to gain new insights into their own educational foundations. Among the questions that are highlighted are: How should schools be organized and operated? What information and values should be emphasized?

Thus, if education is to become universally sound amongst a multicultural world, an educator must first be willing to explore the different reflections a multicultural world presents. Therefore, converting their educational existence to echo that of one which embraces a multicultural existence. Conjointly, the resistance of race, sex, and class within education is immersed in terror. It’s within those fears where teachers perceive a classroom filled with wild creatures who express uncontainable emotions. As hooks would reveal, “The unwillingness to approach teaching from a standpoint that includes awareness of race, sex, and class is often rooted in the fear that classrooms will be uncontrollable, that emotions and passions will not be contained” (39). Hence, an educator’s fear of what a multicultural landscape might express when introduced into an educational environment is based off the assumption of rebellion .One where individuals are seen as unmanageable, they are seen as a threat.

Kumashiro and Ladson-Billings truly reinforced the goals I have for teaching. One of my goals as an educator is to show students how to deconstruct norms set forth by history, to question the common-sense norms that exist today and how they affect people depending on a variation of identities. Ladson-Billings equates this anti-oppressive pedagogy, at a basic level-regarding educator preparation coursework, as “preparing teachers to teach in ways that disrupt, challenge, work against, and critique the status quo.” (Kumarshiro, 2009, p. XVII) Before I teach my own students, I must challenge and critique the foundation in which we are taught on, in terms of educator prep. I have found that educators must get comfortable wearing multiple hats.

In “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education,” from the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Revised Edition, Paulo Freire discusses two different types of education: “banking” and problem-posing. The banking concept of education is when teachers “make deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (318), and ‘problem posing’ is when the teachers and students are equal. Instead of being treated as human beings that have their own thoughts and ideas, students are treated as containers that are simply filled by a powerful being, a teacher. In school, teachers are dominants that provide knowledge to the students, the subordinates; the knowledge that students learn are limited to what they’re taught by teachers. Similarly, in Kurt Wimmer’s ‘Equilibrium’, Librians are treated as reservoirs for knowledge.

When considering the cultural lens of the sociological imagination we pay attention to cultural differences and diversity (Georgeou, 2010). In relation education we look again at the historical view of education as a right and the term considered cultural capital, which has had a strong impact on the social inequalities within education.

Education is an important structure in society that shapes the most important years of your life, and therefore many theorists have ideas about what is wrong with education, what is right, and what needs to change or develop. Education is confined a lot by social control and social reproduction. Social control is a concept that refers to how social systems control the way we feel, think, behave, and even how we should present ourselves. These can appear openly, shown as rules and laws, or they could be not openly acknowledged and just appear as the “common” thing to do. Social reproduction is the reproduction of inequalities throughout generation-to-generation, one way education does this is how it supplies “wealthy” schools more and “poor” schools less. Michael Apple and Maxine Greene both define Social reproductions and Social Control. Throughout this text, I will explain the theories of Greene and Apple, as well as comparing and contrasting them against one another while applying some of my own experiences of education.