The Social Importance of Education

Certain ideas about the relationship among education, poverty, and employment opportunities are assumed by much of society. It is assumed first that gaining a formal education is a key to achieving advancement and to attaining employment opportunities. Poverty is seen as reducing one's ability to gain an education, just as gaining an education is seen as a way of overcoming poverty. The social importance of education is emphasized again and again in the literature on education and also in the literature on various social problems. The writers under discussion here analyze these questions in various ways.

Jonathan Kozol in Savage Inequalities takes the position that the structure of education in American society is based on a two-tiered system which leaves the poorer children behind in terms of the education they can receive. This is a new form of segregation in Kozol's view, a segregation based on race that continues long after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ruled that such inequalities in the public schools had to be eliminated. Kozol travels to real schools to observe, and he finds that little has changed:

Most of the urban schools I visited were 95 to 99 percent nonwhite. In no school that I saw anywhere in the United States were nonwhite children in large numbers truly intermingled with white children (Kozol 3).

Kozol also finds that most people simply believe that the segregation of the past is just that -- something of the past, somethi

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accompanied by a decline in the funding for inner city schools. She finds that there is resistance from those who could provide better funding to doing so: Accompanying the declining economic position of many working- and middle-class white Americans was antagonism to efforts to improve the position of African Americans -- a backlash to the busing of school-children to achieve integration, and to tax burdens that grew as federal money was spent on the Vietnam War and on minorities in the cities (Anyon 130). Indeed, when the legislature was faced with a mandate to equalize spending for the schools, it accomplished this not by spending more in poor and minority neighborhoods but by instituting a cap on spending in more affluent neighborhoods. Anyon is not optimistic about achieving the reform she says the schools need: "Current visions of reform have been quite limited, and have unnecessarily narrowed our sights" (Anyon 148). Education as it is formulated in theory is based on a number of familiar assumptions in American society, assumptions about intelligence, the profession of teaching, and public policy concerning the structure and financing of education, all of which enter into the sense of school as a fairness zone. Th

Category: Psychology - T