The article creates a dialogue between people with and without power to explicitly explain why marginalized children need different intentions from teachers in the school. The article raises a key concept of school’s social structure “the culture of power” which decides “whose voice gets to be heard in determining what is best for children and children of color” (p. 46). Within the concept, the article discusses it from three perspectives: education for all, education for the power, and education for diversity.
In the concept of education for all, the author provides a contrast to point out that different power communities have different foundations of “internalizing the cultural codes” (p. 28). The children with power can easily adopt the goal for “developing fully who they are” with education (p. 28), while the children without power mostly request for “basic discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes” (p. 29). Thus, it is not sufficient to give same instructions to both populations and it is also not realistic to use the same pedagogies which should always be prepared for social diversity.…show more content… Even worse, the discrimination has shifted from disagreeing the voices of the marginalized populations to “the silenced dialogues” (p. 23). The education of empowering the population of power has been deeply rooted in school relations, curriculums, textbooks, and job markets. The cultural codes have progressed and modularized. Meanwhile, marginalized populations are also having their own encoding systems with which people are making sense out of their behaviors. Therefore, to ignore the fact that the education is only speaking for one voice only is an unethical attitude. The author insists that “we must not be too quick to deny [others’] interpretations, or accuse them of “false consciousness, as we are all rational beings” (p.
