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A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform. (n.d.). U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved November 20, 2013, from http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/index.html
Andrade, J. M., & Morrell, E. (2008). The Challenges and Opportunities of Urban Education. The art of critical pedagogy: possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools (pp. 1-22). New York: Peter Lang.
Anyon, J. (1981). Social Class and School Knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry (Vol. 11, No. 1 ed., pp. 189-209). Ontario: Wiley.
Diem, J. (2013) Teaching and Learning 101. The Social and Technological Foundations of Education. Lectures conducted from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL.
Howard, G. R. (2006). We can't teach what we don't know: White teachers, multiracial schools (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.
Lemann, N. (2000). The big test: the secret history of the American meritocracy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
McLaren, P., & Kincheloe, J. L. (2007). Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts. Critical pedagogy: where are we now? (pp. 194-223). New York: Peter Lang.
Steinberg, S. R., Kincheloe, J. L., & Enoma, B. (2006). Meritocratic Mythology: Constructing Success. What You Don't Know About Schools (pp. 169-181). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
The Great Sorting. (n.d.). The Atlantic Online. Retrieved November 20, 2013, from http://weirdsciencekids.com/files/Before_It_s_Too_Late.pdf
The National Commission on Mathematics and Science, U. D. (2000, September 27). Before It's Too Late. Retrieved November 20, 2013, from http://weirdsciencekids.com/files/Before_It_s_Too_Late.pdf
Trumble, R. D. (1997, Sep 22). ANOTHER VIEW: WHY DO WE SEND OUR CHILDREN TO SCHOOL? Virginian - Pilot. Retrieved November 20, 2013, from http://search.proquest.com/docview/388310872?accountid=14585
While there are a host of historical reasons for why the U.S. structures and implements public education the way we do, many agree that the first and foremost purpose of education is to produce students that are functioning members of society.
In conclusion, we "do school" because our society views students as the future leaders of our country- not as leaders in change, but as leaders in maintaining the hierarchical structures we already have in place. Schools prepare students for this role through continuing to emphasize the values upon which our country is built: merit, hard work, and dominance. Maintaining the system of meritocracy leads the elite-class students to believe they have earned, rather than simply been given, the privileges they benefit from. Middle-class students are taught to believe that the American Dream is possible for anyone who works hard. This also works to place the blame on lower socio-economic class students, rather than the system, for not attaining their own merit and equal social standing. The conditioning of these three viewpoints according to class keeps students from questioning whether merit and privilege really come from working under the conditions of equal opportunity, or a system favoring white, affluent students. Our public schools are just one part of the larger structure through which privileged students learn to acquire cultural capital to remain at the top and continue implementing an oppressive social system in which they benefit. Schools prepare our students either to submit to working entry-level jobs within their lower socio-economic class, or to enter the corporate world within their executive/elite class and make decisions as leaders in order to preserve the economic and political dominance of the United States.
The aim of U.S. public schools is to produce students who:
Our country is structured according to the values of the European settlers fleeing religious prosecution from England. Christian values emphasize a focus on hard work with the purpose of delivering glory to God. In accordance with the ideologies promoted in the Bible and Old Testament, U.S. colonists also adhered to the concept of Manifest Destiny through achieving dominance in conquering land and promoting their religious perspective as the singular truth. Howard (2006) writes in his book, "We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools," that, "These deeply held religious beliefs regarding dominion, choseness, the singularity of the truth... and the power of patriarchy have provided the backdrop for the drama of White dominance... throughout the past 500 years these ideas have been manipulated politically to fuel the engine of Western expansion" (Howard, 2006, pg. 59). Throughout U.S. history, citizens of white, European descent continue buying into and implementing this concept of Manifest Destiny through total dominance with systems such as meritocracy.
Because we view students as the future leaders and decision makers of our society, the third purpose of school is to prepare students for political engagement and economic contribution as American citizens.
According to Enoma (2008), meritocracy is the false belief that U.S. systems are designed to allow equal opportunity of social mobility for any U.S. citizen if they just work hard enough.
In the The National Commission on Excellence in Education's government-issued document, "A Nation at Risk" (1983), the very title of the document places emphasis on school's responsibility for producing students who will maintain the U.S.'s political and economic dominance. Written during the Cold War era, the document urges schools to continue promoting the American values of work, competition, and capitalism during a time when U.S. citizens feared that socialist revolutions were a threat to their country's dominance and security.
In his own publication on education reform titled, "Before it's too Late," John Glenn (2000) states, "From mathematics and the sciences will come the products, services, standard of living, and economic and military security that will sustain us at home and around the world. From them will come the technological creativity American companies need to compete effectively in the global marketplace" (Glenn, 2000, pg. 4). Again, the emphasis on students' future duties to serve their nation comes before the matter of learning for the sake of developing thinking skills. Glenn argues that the purpose of teaching STEM subjects in public schools is to ensure the economic prosperity and military security of the country against other economic competitors who pose a threat to North America's dominance. The focus remains on students' ability to compete and uphold the capitalist system which benefits the U.S.
A dissonance exists in our society, which believes that hard work reaps merit for anyone versus the reality that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, meritocracy is a structure providing opportunity only for the elite.
People do not have equal access to opportunities for socially mobility because of socially-constructed barriers such as:
(to name a few)
The dominant group of people born with privilege and taught to believe they have earned their merit are going to hold on to their dominance and pass it down through cultural customs to their children, creating a system of meritocracy where the people at the top remain at the top. Those within this small, elite group are not going to sacrifice their dominance in order to provide equal opportunity for the rest of the people to attain social equality.
We, as a society, continue to promote this false belief of merit in our school systems because it motivates students to continue working hard within the areas of learning that our society values, such as linguistic and mathematical skills. The emphasis and reiteration of the American Dream keeps our students believing in the false promise of equal opportunity without questioning systems in place for serving the elite. In fact, the majority who believe our system is based on merit are ignorant to the opportunity gap for people coming from oppressed social groups; they really believe anyone can make it despite race, class, gender, etc. On the other end of the social hierarchy, meritocracy continues to benefit the dominant group at the top; they are not going to change or eradicate the system that made them elite in the first place. Lastly, whether we are aware of the implications or not, hard work and merit are the values and founding ideologies our very country is built upon, leaving little tolerance for those who question them.
Both chairs of their respective commissions Bell and Glenn agree that the main purpose of school is to prepare students to take their political and economic positions in the global market place. The all-consuming concern for maintaining the U.S.'s dominance over other countries trickles down to the values that shape and define the society in which our students are growing up. From the beginning of grade school, students are conditioned to compete for merit and social dominance within the microsystem of the classroom community. As students enter adulthood with these values in place, the promotion and maintenance of these concerns become high-stakes when citizens begin to believe these values for capitalism, competition, and social dominance will ensure the economic and military security of their country.
The second purpose of our public schools is to prepare students for navigating our society according to our social expectations. According to McLaren (2007), school is the intended place for students to acquire cultural capital to prepare them for becoming fully integrated members of society as adults. Part of this includes the new concept of schools preparing students for future careers– though career choices remain limited to the socio-economic class of each student.
The American notion of needing losers to have winners, in other words, an oppressed group for there to be a dominant group, extends beyond social stratification by class to segregation based on race. The U.S. was not only founded on religious beliefs and principles, but the institution of slavery as well. The American constitution grants the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to white, property-owning males. Our public schools reflect these values through the Euro-centric education intentionally directed to benefit white students. During the formation of the first U.S. public schools, education has been granted exclusively to white students to maintain their power and dominance over the racial others, namely African Americans, to whom access to education has been systematically denied in order to justify their oppression and treatment as sub-humans.
According to Anyon (1981), schools teach the same value for merit to our middle class students so they may continue believing that we live in a just society where all citizens are afforded equal opportunity for social mobility. This not only serves as a successful way for masking schools' darker intentions of social reproduction, but also places the responsibility for failure on individual students who simply didn't "work hard enough," rather than the system set up to benefit the elite few at the top. In this sense, we use schools to condition the mindsets of our students according to their social classes, and teach them what they are to expect for themselves in the future in terms of jobs and social status.
The only similarity between the educations of our higher and lower S.E.S. students is that both groups are educated according to their social standings and made aware of their positions in the hierarchy. In contrast, however, almost all executive/elite class students are exposed to higher-level or advanced curriculum in which they are taught to use critical thinking and analysis, beyond simply acquiring the skills for entry-level jobs. These students' acquisition of critical thinking skills is not a threat to the larger educational system because, again, the students benefiting from the structure in place will not see a need to use their skills to change or eradicate it.
Social reproduction means that the input of our schools, what we teach, results exactly in the output we get– the continued social stratification of our students according to their socio-economic classes. Jean Anyon (1981) explains the implementation of this system in "Social Class and School Knowledge," where she describes a case study describing how teachers educate their students according to their socio-economic classes.
Though the majority of U.S. citizens have come to realize that the segregation and even denial of access to education are responsible for the systemic failure of black students, many fail to understand that our school system, though evolved, is the same system constructed during the era of slavery. Our public schools remain directed toward serving white students through both intentionally and unintentionally teaching the singular white perspective. White dominance permeates every aspect of what is taught in schools. English class curriculum almost exclusively consists of literature by white, European authors such as Shakespeare, Jane Austin, and Charles Dickens, to name a few. Even novels that do cover historical issues concerning racism and slavery in the U.S. are most frequently selected from white authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, making first-account pieces by authors such as Frederick Douglass an exclusive occurrence. This issue extends into history class, where teachers almost exclusively educate students on the white perspective of imperialists and colonists in textbooks published by majority white authors. An achievement gap appears when students of other racial groups are educated and tested on this curriculum that ignores and alienates any other perspective than the "white truth." In "The Art of Critical Pedagogy," Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008) state, “Perpetual urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone has to fail in school. In fact, this quasi-Darwinian belief system is built into most schools through the existence of a largely unchallenged pedagogical system of grading and testing that by its very design guarantees failure for some" (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008, pg. 2). The academic failure of non-white students is certainly guaranteed when they are held accountable for studying the history of their oppression exclusively through the perspective of the dominant group who implements it.
In summation of these social, racial, and class-sensitive issues in education, Trumble (1997) explains: “What is the purpose of 12 years or more of institutionalized, regulated, formal education? Part of it is surely the transmission of culture: teaching our children where we've come from so they'll care about where we're going.” Our schools are responsible for giving cultural capital to our elite white students so they may understand how to navigate our social systems to their advantage and develop an individualistic, competitive mindset so they may value the capitalist system which benefits them. In his book describing the evolution of education, academic tracking, and standardized testing to sort students, Lemann (1999) writes, "the old, hereditary aristocracy has shifted to a would-be meritocracy in which 'education tends -- and is explicitly, energetically, used by parents -- to transfer status between generations, not to alter or upend it'" (Lemann, 1999). The purpose of education is to teach students to pass on their dominance to other members within the elite group through the system of cultural capital. Students who are not part of the white, elite class are conditioned to conform to the expectations of working entry-level jobs and agreeing that their intelligence depends on factors beyond control rather than the skewed educational system we conform to.
Within public schools, our students of the top socio-economic class are informed of their privilege and duty to maintain it because our society accepts that "this is the way it has to be." According to our belief in systems like meritocracy, we need losers in order for there to be winners, or an elite, in the hierarchy. Schools want students to believe that they are, in fact, earning or not earning their own merit from which they benefit, rather than attributing privilege to their social class or race. Meritocracy allows the elite to justify their dominance and attribute failure to individuals' choices rather than the larger systems in place. Finally, schools intend to pass down individualistic, American values such as competing, winning, and losing in order for students to value and maintain the overarching capitalist system in which we live.
Our public education system intentionally produces working-class students that are "just smart enough to pull the lever." Schools place these students into lower-level curriculum classes and vocational programs for career preparation so future employers may save money on tasks such as training employees and paying them for those hours.
As illustrated her publication, Anyon (1981), shows that working-class students demonstrate having an external locus of control when it comes to knowledge and intelligence. When asked where knowledge comes from, students named administrative groups such as the Board of Education. The same students, when asked if they could make knowledge, answered no, because knowledge comes from the elite groups mentioned earlier. When asked, then, if they have the opportunity to have any job they want, the students replied no again, explaining that they do not have the intelligence or skills for higher-level jobs they may have dreamed of working in as young children. These students demonstrate a fixed-mindset for learning and intelligence because school has conditioned them to believe they belong in their lower social classes due to their lack of intelligence and knowledge.