BLOG ENTRY ONE: A HOPE IN THE UNSEEN: SOCIAL INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

I recently read the book A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. It was a book about a high school senior born and raised in the inner city streets of Washington, DC. Cedric Jennings was an honor roll student who studied and strived well beyond the expectations of his teachers and peers. His tenacity led him to Brown University, an Ivy League school. What seemed to be a triumph, became a nightmare for Cedric. He found himself far behind most of the other freshmen. He had to manage an array of intellectual and social changes around him, and he discovered that he had little in common with the white students, many of whom came from privileged backgrounds.

This book left me questioning the educational system in America, in particular urban education. To boast America as a democratic society with equal opportunity for all, how could Cedric and millions of other minority students like him, be so shortchanged? This question led me to two articles in our texts, "Unlearning Black and White: Race, Media and the Classroom" from The Children’s Culture Reader, and "School Desegration" from Childhood in America. After reading these articles, I narrowed my paper topic from the study of urban education to the study of educational inequalities between urban black youths and white youths with more privileged backgrounds.

In "Unlearning Black and White" the author examines the history of the civil rights movement in the 20th century, from Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) to the mid seventies. Sharin Goldin discusses how images of the child and the idea of the classroom during this time period provide some sort of "solution" and it also reveals contradictory responses to the civil rights movement and confronting racial injustice. She also makes some attempts to evaluate media’s influence of capturing what was going on in classrooms across America. I add attempt, because she weakly links the two.

Children represented victimization experienced in a contemporary society and a vehicle for a more just society in the future. According to Goldin, children played a central role in the civil rights discourse. The black child standing alone and being called names expressed the adult fears of unfairness and inequality. "…To all the questions, tears and anger children brought back home [from school], the back family and its community were fully engaged" (137).

This, along with other factors, ultimately led to the push of integrated schools. These integrated classrooms were the backdrop and vehicles for exploring race. It was a way to evaluate America’s race blind society. If integrated schools failed, then the country deprived black children of equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Of course it was met with opposition and hesitation. Whites argued that black students were disruptive and behind academically. Blacks argued that they would not be able to identify with a classroom where their teachers were white, their peers were predominately white, and their curriculum was white male dominated. Those for integration argued that this was the ideal classroom setting. It was a place to "transcend the limitations of one’s surrounding" (145).

John Dewey stated that "each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he [or she] was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment." That is, reeducation of race was demanding, and it demanding students of different races to interact. The author observed that debates about confronting history played out around the child-staged through the classroom-as a testing ground for strategies for social and cultural transformation. Children have and will always provide answers (and hope) to our social problems.

In the second article, "School Desegregation" Chief Justice Earl Warren called for an end to legal segregation in schools. This landmark decision has been known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). This question separated the country for years: "Does segregation of children in public schools, solely on the basis of race deprive the children of the minority group of equal education?" The Supreme Court argued, "We believe it does" (318).

Justice Warren believed that segregation fostered a feeling of inferiority that affected the hearts, minds and motivation for children of color to learn. In the field of education, he argued, "the doctrine of separate but equal has no place…separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" (319).

Although this decision was made over 40 years ago, America still deals with schools being blatantly segregated based on race and socio-economic status. Both of these articles primarily focused on the history of segregation and the impact of segregation and integration on American society, pushing the children in the forefront. These articles help me narrow my topic, because it help me get a better understanding of how our educational system has gone from inequality of education between whites and blacks to the attempts to rectify the injustices against blacks. I believe that although some progresses have been made, I still witness inequalities in education.