Still Separate Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid Analysis

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According to College Atlas, at least thirty percent of college students drop out their first year of college, there are multiple factors that contribute to such abominable rates; lack of financial support, bad K-12 curriculum, family issues, among others. Paul Tough in “Who Gets to Graduate?” came to this conclusion; Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t since students from lower class families are less likely to graduate because they have less support and are insecure whether they should stay in college or drop out (1-10). Many of them feel discriminated in the university environment. This happens mainly because those struggling students come from a high school with a bad curriculum that doesn’t prepare for university-level …show more content…
Jonathan Kozol in “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid” describes America’s educational system as an apartheid with expensive kids and cheap kids, where the expensive kids get a better education. Many first-generation, low-income students struggle when they arrive at the university due to educational inequality and educational apartheid. High-income families can afford better pre-k education, some of them paying up to more than twenty thousand dollars of tuition yearly per child. Kozol agrees when he writes “affluent parents pay surprisingly large sums of money to enroll their youngsters, beginning at the age of two or three, in extraordinary early-education programs that give them social competence and rudimentary pedagogic skills unknown to children of the same age in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. According to Kozol, the most exclusive of the private schools in New York, which are known to those who can afford them as ‘Baby Ivies’ cost as much as $24,000 for a full day program” (22). Kozol’s research also found that those children living in the poorer neighborhoods won’t learn those pedagogic skills. Other than pedagogic skills required in college, high schools in poorer districts don’t prepare students for college in any form. For example, Kozol …show more content…
In “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, Paulo Freire develops the “banking” concept of education is the outdated educational system, and the name is a metaphor that refers to students as containers where the education must be deposited by the teachers. This reinforces the lack of critical thinking, thus stopping the brain development. The “Problem-posing” concept of education is a modern educational system that focuses on critical thinking; instead of depositing knowledge into the students’ brain from the teacher, this concept formulates the transmission of knowledge through dialogue between the student and the educator (2). Freire is basically saying that the “Banking” concept of education stops us from exercising our brain because it doesn’t allow us to use our critical thinking skills, which is the thing that we need the most in college since we must learn a tremendous amount of information in an insignificant amount of time. Problem-posing education is the concept of education that must be used because it stimulates our critical thinking skills as well as other senses. “Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality; thereby responding to the