The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies, Christine E. Sleeter
A Short History of Public Schooling
Carlos didn't have much interest in school, he claims that school was very boring for him so he decided to join the military rather than go to college. He ran into a friend from school one day who was going to a community college and mentioned he was taking Chicano studies courses and encouraged Carlos to go check the classes out. He decided to check out the classes and realized the curriculum was centered around his reality, that lead him to completing two years of community college and then went on to complete a BA degree in Spanish. I feel this related a lot to the Precious Knowledge video we watched in class because they also didn't really like school and felt like school was against them. However, once they started taking the Ethnic studies they were really interested in what they were learning and could relate to the material. They felt like they could be themselves and became more confident, overall there was a positive impact on the students both socially and academically. Also, "Whites continue to receive the most attention and appear in the widest variety of roles, dominating story lines and lists of accomplishments. African Americans, the next most represented racial group, appear in a more limited range of roles and usually receive only a sketchy account historically, being featured mainly in relationship to slavery. Asian Americans and Latinos appear mainly as figure on the landscape with virtually no history or contemporary ethnic experience. Native Americans appear mainly in the past, but also occasionally in contemporary stories in reading books. Immigration is represented as a distinct historical period that happened mainly in the Northeast, rather than as an ongoing phenomenon." They wanted textbook companies to produce and offer curricula that reflected the diversity of the United States population because the texts were saying almost nothing about contemporary race relations, racism, or racial issues. "Like the eighth graders interviewed by Epstein, 43 gifted Black middle school students interviewed by Ford and Harris (2000) all expressed a desire to learn more about Black people in school; most agreed that this would make school more interesting, and almost half agreed that they got tired of learning about White people all the time." Therefore, Epstein concluded that African American students “learned to distrust the historical knowledge taught in schools and turned to family, community members, and Black oriented texts” for their education.
In the video, "A Short History of Public Schooling", it shows the history of school and how kids used to be taught at home and out in the real world and then by 1918 every state required students to complete at least elementary school. They thought that obedience to authority, attendance, and organizing time according to bell ringing would help students prepare for future employment. In the video they mentioned, "The whole purpose of it is to create a docile military work force" and to "Get them in that mindset of being subordinated". The system is designed to regiment a large group of people and to get them to all do the exact same thing, and for children to take their place in society. For a point I would share in class, one would definitely be this video and another would be a quote from the text, “learned to distrust the historical knowledge taught in schools and turned to family, community members, and Black oriented texts”.
These images are from the "A Short History of Public Schooling" video.
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