On Thursday, February 22nd, I conducted an interview with my father, Élie Courdi, about his experiences in primary and secondary school. Élie was born in Egypt but immigrated to Canada with his mother at five years of age, so he identifies primarily as a Quebecer from Egyptian origin. He is now 53 years old and speaks both English and French. He still understands Arabic, his maternal language, but does not speak it fluently anymore. The interview was conducted at our home in St-Bruno and he seemed interested in this opportunity to reflect back on his past schooling experience, although he had trouble remembering many details. Following a year in integration class for immigrants at kindergarten level, he went to elementary school at a French …show more content…
That is, regardless of the social structure and social stratification, an individual can move from a disadvantageous ascribed status to a “higher” achieved status through the educational opportunities school offers (Barakett & Cleghorn, 2008, p.5). At first stance, I though this function was well achieved in Élie’s case, but through our discussion, I came to understand that even though he’s current achieved status is “better” than his ascribed status, school did not contribute to provide him with opportunities for social mobility. Coming from a relatively poor background, Élie now belongs to a much higher class, but according to him, it was his personal choices and perseverance much after high school that allowed him to achieve that new status. However, I still believe school played a role in the sense that by the end of his formal schooling, Élie felt much more integrated in Quebec’s society, spoke the main language and assumed his identity as an immigrant more openly, all aspects of his life that would have otherwise closed him a lot of opportunities (É. Courdi, personal communication, February 22, …show more content…
This function refers to the role that school plays in allowing children to learn how to act with their peers, and at the same time, in encouraging students to stay within their group of the same age, gender, class or race (Barakett & Cleghorn, 2008, p.7). Élie’s experience in elementary and secondary school clearly reveals how schools performs this function. As mentioned above, peer pressure played an important role in social control, which also translated in subgroup control as students were encouraged to stay with people of similar interests, tastes and clothing style. Specifically, Élie mentioned many of his friends were like him raised by single mothers and came from the same social class. This had long-term repercussion in Élie’s life, since he met his current two best friends in high school. As for behaviour between students, school did transmit some expectations of mutual respect and standard norms such as waiting for your turn to speak (É. Courdi, personal communication, February 22,
“Standard English was imposed on children of immigrant parents, then the children were separated from native English speakers, then the children were labeled “inferior” and “ignorant” (Hughes 70) because they could not speak Standard English. In addition to feeling inferior about their second language skills, these students also felt inadequate in regard to speaking their own mother tongues” (qtd in Kanae)
In his essay “Land of Opportunity” James W. Loewen details the ignorance that most American students have towards class structure. He bemoans the fact that most textbooks completely ignore the issue of class, and when it does it is usually only mentions middle class in order to make the point that America is a “middle class country. This is particularly grievous to Loewen because he believes, “Social class is probably the single most important variable in society. From womb to tomb, it correlates with almost all other social characteristics of people that we can measure.” Loewen simply believes that social class usually determine the paths that a person will take in life. (Loewen 203)
Nevertheless, our social structure isn’t a brick wall were individuals are trapped in there social class. We are still able with education and the opportunities to shape our lives and achieve our full potential. Harlon L. Dalton emulates the possibility within his story about Horatio Alger, “neither Alger nor the myth suggests that we start out equal. Nor does the myth necessarily require that we be given an equal opportunity to succeed. Rather, Alger’s point is that each of us has the power to create our own opportunities.”
... education proved challenging for Home children during adulthood. The many difficulties the young immigrants endured not only isolated them form Canadians around them but it also discouraged most Home children from staying in rural communities.
Does it matter what your social and economical standings are, and do they play a role in if you will succeed in life? The importance of this essay was to talk about the different viewpoints and to argue the point of succeeding and social statuses. I
The essay starts off by talking about a common belief shared by many parents now about how students miss out on “a great deal by not being taught their family’s language”(Rodriguez 525). But the author states that this isn’t always true especially considering the children who are socially disadvantaged in any way, they more than likely consider their native tongue or the language used at home to be just that a private language that should only be used around or with the family, he also highlights how odd it was that his childhood classmates
Some people may believe that education all over the United States is equal. These people also believe that all students no matter their location, socioeconomic status, and race have the same access and quality of education, but ultimately they are wrong. Throughout history, there has been a huge educational disparity between the wealthy and marginalized communities. The academic essay “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by Jean Anyon, an American critical thinker and researcher in education, conveys that depending on the different economic backgrounds students have, they will be taught in a specific way. He reveals that the lower economic background a child has then the lower quality their education will be and the higher their economic background is the higher quality their education is. Anyon’s theory of a social ladder is extremely useful because it sheds light on the
Allen supports her claims about hierarchies and power dynamics in her chapter “Social Class Matters.” She dives into the structures of society by examining power and social class in various contexts. In this chapter, she explains that people are categorized according to themes of class difference and struggle. Social class is associated with the relationship between power and the distribution of resources. Because this stratification system of social class is one of the biggest predictors of school achievement, social identity plays a large role in the social reproduction of inequality in the education system.
For more than 300 years, immigrants from every corner of the globe have settled in America, creating the most diverse and heterogeneous nation on Earth. Though immigrants have given much to the country, their process of changing from their homeland to the new land has never been easy. To immigrate does not only mean to come and live in a country after leaving your own country, but it also means to deal with many new and unfamiliar situations, social backgrounds, cultures, and mainly with the acquisition and master of a new language. This often causes mixed emotions, frustration, awkward feelings, and other conflicts. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, the author describes the social, cultural and linguistic difficulties encountered in America as he attempts to assimilate to the American culture. Richard Rodriguez by committing himself to speaking English, he lost his cultural ties, family background and ethnic heritage.
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.
With the debate over bilingual education, Kenneth Jost covers some of the history in teaching in his article “Bilingual Education vs. English Immersion”. For over one hundred and fifty years, America either maintained segregated schools or immigrants learned by immersion into the English system. Even the “African slaves, with limited if any formal schooling, learned English through their work. . . .” (Jost 13). Just as the Chinese laborers learned English, so did the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. When I was growing up, I can remember my grandmother telling stories of when she started school. Her father was from Norway and did not speak much, if any, English. In their home Norwegian was spoken. When the children went to school, they would learn English, and then came home and taught their parents. I can remember her telling how she would sneak her older brother’s or sister’s book written in Norwegian to help her study because her class was taught to use English only. Unless the community possessed a school in the immigrants’ native language, they learned Engl...
In the article, “Ethnic Differences in Educational Attainment among the children of Canadian Immigrants,” Abada, Hou and Ram illustrate the effects that ethnicity, family structure, and parent education have on the education of immigrant youth. The authors prove the cause and effect through research, surveys, charts and tables. Using these methods, it becomes clear that things like parent educational level, discrimination, residency, and more, have a tie to immigrant youth’s educational attainment. Comparing alongside is a magazine article of the same topic, “Ethnicity Has Great Impact on Degree Grades” by David Jobbins. Touching along the same ideas, this article outlines the fact that ethnicity has more impact on educational attainment than gender, background, or type of school.
Education has been historically considered as an equalizer of society in America, allowing the opportunity for even the disadvantaged to reach success. Race was once the strongest factor in determining future achievement, but today Stanford Sociologist, Sean F. Reardon, says income level has become more consequential (Tavernise). President Barack Obama was one of the lucky few able to overcome the obstacles he faced growing up being both African American and underprivileged, but most children are not as lucky (Rampton , Nawaguna). In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, the Lacks family lived in poverty and struggled to perform well in school, resulting in many of them dropping out even before high school (Skloot). The success gap between high and low income students in the U.S. has increased significantly in recent years (McGlynn). The educational achievement of students is significantly affected by their home life, and those living in poverty are much more likely to fall behind academically than children coming from affluent families.
The analytical lens that will be constructed aims to allow for an interpretation of how students who are attempting to be upwardly-mobile are helped with moving beyond roadblocks that prevent mobility. This is mobility is achieved through a combination of adherence to meritocratic systems and the borrowing of cultural capital. I will argue that reproduction occurs when reliance on meritocracy in the educational system and the limited cultural capital of the student’s working-class parent/s are solely employed. In order to move beyond a mere reproduction of the parent’s social class, I argue that the student must interact with individuals or groups from higher social spheres who know how to activate cultural capital in specific instances
...ents go on addressing them in their natural language, but the children reply in English. What the children of immigrants end up with is not a compromise, not a blend. They end up pure and simple with the language and culture of their peers” (pg. 30).