Cedric Jennings in A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
Throughout the novel, A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, Cedric Jennings is a minority student in a poor, inner city school, trying to fight his way up to the top. He has a greater hope for himself than the overwhelming majority of the other students at Ballou High. Cedric faces many challenges to eventually make his way to Brown University. According to Labaree, Cedric is exercising the goal of social mobility, meaning that he works against the competition to get into a high-ranking college and hopefully a well-paying job. Although personally Cedric is trying to obtain this goal, I am having difficulty placing what purpose of education that Ballou High is trying to fulfill.
Cedric is an unusual student to walk the halls of Ballou High. Unlike most of his peers, he actually wants to make something of himself; he does his homework, he studies and he works on extra credit projects. The majority of the kids at Ballou barely come to class, much less make any attempt at learning. Since this is the overall attitude of the school, Cedric must exercise social mobility and do whatever he can to better himself as an individual. He is not necessarily competing against the students at Ballou (because he by far surpasses them), but he is in competition with all the other students from better schools throughout the area. During the summer that Cedric spends at MIT, he is truly awakened to the fact that he was extremely far behind the other students from urban areas. The director of the program expresses his frustration with the MIT program- "When he first arrived... He had grand plans to find poor black and Hispanic kids from urban America-... He saw that he had been drea...
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...uality. In fact there is a severe inequality in only preparing the top few students for society. Therefore, it is hard to decide what goal of Labaree's that Ballou High embodies. The bottom line is that some students value social mobility and the rest of the school values nothing.
In conclusion, although Cedric is able to exercise social mobility, his school does not prepare him for the outside world at all. It is only through his own resolve that he is able to make it in the competitive, academic world. The only good that Ballou probably brought to Cedric was the notion to work even harder so that he did not end up like his fellow peers, with no goals, going nowhere, and valuing nothing. It is this value of nothing that severely hinders our nation's public school systems.
Works Cited
Suskind, Ron. A Hope in the Unseen. Broadway Books, New York. 1998.
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