The Role Of Minority Groups In Schools

Many students go to school to learn, interact with others to develop socializing skill, write, compute, and educate themselves through many contents of subjects that school provide. As students advance to higher level of school, they use acquired knowledges to move forward. All the resources that influence on students in education are heavily depended on school system, and they play important role in many ways.

In America, many different racial students are gathered in school. Because they all have different background, cultures, languages, rules and religions, they may be confused on their identities as they develop bond to each other. Since many factors including school facilities, teachers, and rules can be effected, well established school

In John Ogbu’s reading, “the difficulties in social adjustment and academic performance experienced by minority children might be due to such cultural/language differences” (John U. OGBU, pg. 313) where academic performance gap between dominant group and minority group exist. Especially in English class, dominant group such as native speaker use English freely and can express well on their thoughts and feelings in writing, on the other hand, minority group feel very challenging on writing a paper. For example, one of my discussion group member shared his worry about writing an essay that it takes more than two days to complete four pages of essay, and must hire someone to check on his paper. Because he felt so different styles and difficulties in writing, he always has been suffered on his grades. According to Sina Nasiri, “because the language they write is foregin, they face differences which make the writing difficult.” (Sina Nasiri) Nowadays schools aware of this problem, many schools including UCSD provide writing center to help students, and they are receiving support from volunteered students also. Schools and teachers can pay more attention to diverse culture styles, how they are being taught, and adjust their styles in a way to success

According to John Ogbu’s reading, “Punjabi Indians enter the public schools from a cultural background that teaches children to defer to adult authority, in contrast to the school expectation that children should defend their ideas even when those ideas are in conflict with those of adults, including the teacher.” (John Ogbu, Pg. 327) Similar to Ogbu’s reading, in my country we are not allow to oppose to teacher’s opinion, we do not have any opportunities to have peer discussion during class, mostly asking and answering question between teachers and students. Also in another case, not all schools do this, but most schools have specific gender admission system. There are many same sex gender requiring school in Korea, where they believe this is better education system because teachers can use their authority to control students. For example only male students in school, teachers use violation as authority, not harsh, but does involve against students’ behavior. Teachers should not use their authority to give any pressure on students, but try to approach with thoughtfulness. One of the thing that I noticed from American school is that teachers give lot of discussion time to make students to share their thoughts. Instructors are open minded to students and are willing to listen to their thoughts, use their time to let students to freely talk, cooperating with others