Equal Opportunity Education

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Equal Opportunity Education Parents send their children to school to acquire a good education which will help them prepare for adulthood. We hope they will be successful and make us proud of them. By the time children start school, most parents have already developed an expectation of the type of grades their children will receive and how their children will behave in school. Many children, however, have a different experience than that envisioned by their parents. In his essay, “I Just Wanna Be Average,” author Mike Rose relates how he mistakenly started high school in vocational classes due to an error within the school. Eventually the error was discovered, and he found himself enrolled in an English class that was taught by an exceptional teacher. The teacher was able to kindle his interest in English, and Rose graduated from this school in the College Prep curriculum. Although he provides his own experience, we can apply the need for exceptional teachers to all students. Rose’s example is further supported with the suggestion that certain children are being selected according to social class to achieve, by author John Taylor Gatto’s essay, “Against School.” Gatto was a teacher for thirty years in Manhattan; he suggests the general purpose of education is to control the population, a more cynical theory for the reasons our modern day schools exist. Further, teachers need to consider the curriculum in the schools our children attend; some curriculums can lead to boredom. Gatto provides arguments that teachers and children are uninterested and therefore unable to succeed in school. Similarly, author Jean Anyon provides a study describing how resources correlate with a school’s socioeconomic class in her essay, ”From Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work.” Schools don’t actually perform the function mainstream America expects them to. Every child learns

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