Think about hierarchy, a hierarchy is a system which rank people one above the other. In Ho’s article, Wall street has a hierarchy which Harvard and Princeton are at the top and the following are ranked from the rest Ivy League school to other colleges. In Davidson’s article, Duke’s students are on the top of the hierarchy in the I-pod experiment with the easiest access to gain free I-pod. Hierarchy is deeply entrenched but never complicate Davidson’s egalitarian plans because the education equality which Davidson advocate is never exist in the real life. Even though individuals can undergo same education system and study same education content. Egalitarian of education will not happen with different social environment, but hierarchy do. …show more content…
There has been hierarchy all the time in the society. Assume education equality is feasible, hierarchy is a normal and not going to complicate egalitarian of education. According to Ho, “ The culture of smartness is not simply a quality of Wall Street, but a currency, a driving force productive of both profit accumulation and global prowess.” (167) In this case, the culture of smartness serves as a hierarchy pyramid, the brightest people are the ‘ cream of the crop ’ on the top of the pyramid. The most population working place, investment banks in Wall Street, chooses smartest people to fit in it (bank) . This recruiting process is quite normal. Despite a obvious example of hierarchy - Princeton and Harvard are on the top of Ivy League schools. When bankers come from NYC to Princeton to recruit potential employees, bankers ranked students roughly from the most desirable group to the least. Those actions indicate people are living around different forms of hierarchy. Under this situation, individuals are supposed to learn in many ways and devote themselves to society in their own stratum. Davidson mentioned a green-haired girl in her article, “The girl with the green hair has special skills that shows up nowhere on her compulsory EOG state tests (...) and yet she has a special and valued ability that cannot be replaced by a computer program.” As the education in this girl’s classroom is not equal at all, because this girl is not interested in that which is taught. This kind of teaching and imparting knowledge is not a egalitarian of education but a form of false impression and time waste. A hierarchy may take shape automatically from top scored students to lower grade students. However, this girl devote herself into painting which she is good at and can bring happiness to her classmates other than listening classes. She released her potential abilities and play a positive role even she is at the middle or low
I feel the author is attempting to convey that class means everything when it comes to education. Mantsios lists several references and charts that show what the odds would be if you were low, middle, or high class to attend a university and what level of education you might obtain.
In the study of The Way Schools Work we learned to question the ideals of meritocracy and the American dream. However, Conflict Theories challenge the system of meritocracy, in which people are sorted and selected on the basis of talent and ability. On the contrary, “Conflict Theories, on the other hand, imply a system of inheritance in which people’s life chances are largely determined by their starting point within an existing structure of inequality” (McNamee and Miller Jr. 2014, 11). According to these theorists mentioned in The Way Schools Work (Boudin 1974; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Carnoy 1972; Carnoy and Levin 1985; Persell 1977), they speak about how schools reproduce status in several ways. First, they use formal language, and hold
Social class should not be used to define a person. Every person has the ability to overcome the roadblocks that society has placed in their path, so long as they have the determination and motivation. In Gerald Graff’s article, “Hidden Intellectualism” , he explains how social class is irrelevant when it comes to education, despite what society will lead you to believe. He displays how everyone is intelligent in his or her own way.Lynda Barry during her article, “ The Sanctuary of School” spoke about the importance of education to her and many other students like her.Another writer, Mike Rose shows how despite the thoughts that society puts in our heads we can still be successful in his article “Blue Collar Brilliance”.Regardless of social
The United States of America has been touted as the land of opportunity. The American dream was the reason many immigrants moved to this nation, all hoping to rise from rags to riches. Although likely at some point, the current situation exudes a different result. The problem in the United States is that there is a class divide that gives advantage to those who already have sufficient lifestyles over those who constantly face adversity. This situation causes a loop where the children of the educated get educated while those without are never given the opportunity to receive.
Through Freire’s “ The Banking Concept of Education,'; we see the effects this concept has on it’s students and also we see the effects that the alternate concept, problem-posing has. The ‘banking’ concept allows the students to become vessels of knowledge, not being able to learn at a creative pace. By using communism, seeing through how education is taught in the classroom, it is parallel to Freire’s ‘banking’ concept. We can see that both ideas are similar and both were harmful to the human mind. While ‘banking’ poses the threat of creative growth and power, Marxism, which applies Marx’s ideas to learning in a communistic way, it creates the threat of never being able to learn.
Returning to his old high school after having had graduate ten years ago, Shamus Rahman Khan came in with one goal: to study the inequality of a school that claims to be more “diverse.” St. Paul’s School located in Concord, New Hampshire claims to have become more diverse over the years, accepting people of different racial backgrounds and social classes to their prestigious boarding school. However, as described in his book, Khan found that this claim made by the school is false. He also found out that the elite that used to attend his school is not the same as the elite attending it now. Nonetheless, it was the elite that were succeeding because they were the ones who could afford the school, had family linages that already attended the school, and mastered “ease” which made them privileged in society. Separating his book into five different chapters, each focusing on a different topic that helps support his claim, Khan describes this change in elite and the inequality that still accompanies St. Paul’s. In the introduction to Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Khan states the three most important points he will refer to during the rest of the book: hierarchies are natural and can be used to one’s advantage, experiences matter more than inherited qualities, and the elite signal their status through ease and openness. These are discussed thoroughly in throughout Privilege.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the American educational system has undergone much transition in response to our changing society. Though there have been many problems raised throughout the years in regard to what our school systems should be teaching our children, there have also been many developments.
Meritocracy, unlike aristocracy, is the system in which talented people are rewarded and promoted to leadership positions based on their merit. According to James Whitehurst, meritocracy “now refers to organizations where the best people and ideas win.” However, as true as it may sound, meritocracy in America is still a myth and is not a certainty. In the article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack,” McIntosh’s disdain of meritocracy when she described as “I must give up the myth of meritocracy.” She mentioned the meritocracy myth because in reality, many people who lack talents and experience can still climb the upward mobility ladder and become wealthier while the rest of
Social stratification is seen everywhere within the United States and around the world. As discussed in lecture, there are two types of stratification systems, and both are prominent in the United States. The first type is achievement based, which depends on a person’s wealth and accomplishments (Wadsworth). In the film, “People Like Us,” this system is presented. A teenage boy is embarrassed of his mother and his family’s social status, so he hides is social class from his friends. The second system is ascription-based stratification which has to do with what an individual is born with. The school that was interviewed and observed in “People Like Us,” prove that the family you are born into plays a huge role in popularity, and the group of friends you choose to surround yourself with. Another example in this film was the WASP label. The man they interviewed, explained that you are
In her article she points out how social class has become the main gateway to opportunity in America. The widening academic divide means that kids who grow up poor will most likely stay poor and the kids who grow up rich will most likely stay rich. About fifty years ago the main concern about getting a good education relied on your race but now it's about your social class. Researchers are starting to believe that children who come from higher income families tend to do better in school and get higher test scores.
First, the chapters cover stratification. According to study.com “Social stratification refers to a system by which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy. In the United States, it is perfectly clear that some groups have greater status, power, and wealth than other groups.” According to the textbook “Stratification is unequal distribution of valued
The education system has been a controversial issue among educators. Requirements of school do not let student choose what they want to study for their future. It’s a big issue to force student study specific curriculums, which don’t help them improve, and what they like to create something. Educators choose a general system for education to all students which based on general knowledge. Intelligent or genius students have to be in that system of education, which doesn’t let them improve their creativity. Educators attempt to change that system to make it better, but their changing was not that great to be an example for the world. Also, did that change qualify education system to compete other systems or not? In some examples and reasons have been made me agree with some of points from Gatto’s and Edmunson’s and disagree them.
While traditional societies relied on ascribed characteristics to determine an individual’s role in society, modern societies use the education system as a means to sort individuals on the basis of achievement, using measures such as grades, test scores, and work ethic to guide high-achieving students into jobs that recognize and utilize their skills, and low-achieving students into jobs that are less skill-demanding. For example, a high-school student with high-grades, high test scores, and a strong work ethic will be readily accepted into colleges and universities and afforded with opportunities to pursue more intellectually demanding occupations, but a high-school student with low-grades, low test-scores, and a low-to-moderate work ethic will not be accepted into college, and rather, must enter the workforce with only a high school degree, limiting his career options to categories that require low-to-average cognitive skills. Thus, the education system ensures that only the most qualified individuals end up in challenging occupations, directly serving the needs of industrial society. Specifically, functionalists argue that education as a system of role differentiation is beneficial in two ways. Firstly, it is able to address
Social stratification is prevalent in every society and displays diversity in its organizing principles across the world. Social stratification is defined as “the way in which a society organizes itself so that individuals know their place or rank, also called their social position, in society”(Our social world: An introduction to sociology, 2015) There are several broad categories of stratification systems prevalent in our world today; slavery, caste, and the class system are three of them. Each have different degrees of mobility and varying amount of ease to move up or down into different social positions. An open mobility system would permit achieved status or personal accomplishments to influence position while a closed system would only allow individuals to remain in the position they were born into.
One positive argument about social stratification is that it is necessary in order to get difficult tasks performed, because only people that are trained to do certain tasks can do them. Another argument is that people naturally tend to accept a status hierarchy and their place in it. Life is said to be more stable and serene in stratified societies. The culture found in a stratified society is more satisfying than in a homogenized society, some say. On the other hand, “A society that encourages status striving produces in contrast a good deal of brushing, disappointment, and ugly