Analysis Of Land Of Opportunity Loewen

604 Words2 Pages

Critique Essay
Land of Opportunity, is ironically about the actual lack of opportunity in history. James W. Loewen, who also holds a PhD in sociology, is a writer who questions, in an overly biased way, the many assumptions about history. Writing about how your race, wealth, and status can potentially determine your education and future, he aggressively, yet accurately insists that social class and inequality is an essential element for students to learn, understand and grow. “They have no understanding of the ways that opportunity is not equal, influencing the ideas they hold and the lives they fashion.” (Loewen 215) This particular quote in the first paragraph of his essay, strikes as a very generalizing tone as he speaks about the college …show more content…

“No book mentions the Hormel meat-packers' strike in the mid-1980s or the air traffic controllers strike broken by President Reagan. Nor do textbooks describe any continuing issues facing labor, such as the growth of multinational corporations and their exporting of jobs overseas.” This specific quote demonstrates that he does not provide evidence regarding how every single textbook does not address said disputes. There may or may not be textbooks out there that discloses such information, however, as an audience we would not truly know whether or not this is a factual due to his negligence to provide evidential confirmation. “Six of Che dozen high school American history textbooks I examined contain no index listing at all for "social class," "social stratification,11 "class structure," "income distribution," "inequality," or any conceivably related topic. Not one book lists "upper class," "working class," or "lower class." He speaks about, from what he has read and studied, there is a lack of social class discussion. He, however, provides us with in the next paragraph with some evidence stemming from what he has read. Nevertheless, this is not a compelling reason to generalize that every single text book in the world does not touch on said subjects. . The overall tone of Loewens essay is undesirable at some

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