By: Patrick J. Finn
Reflection:
Like others in the class, I found this piece to be somewhat confusing. After reading it a few times however I believe that I got the underlying meaning to the piece. I do see some Delpit in it regarding to the culture of power. When Finn talked about the different levels of education, (The working class, middle class, the affluent professional, and the executive elite) I couldn't help but compare this to Rhode Island. The "working class" I thought of as inner city schools such as the ones that we do service learning at. Then I compared the middle class to schools in Rhode Island that are just you're average schools. For the affluent professional, I compared this to some of the art schools in Rhode Island Then finally for the executive elite I thought of private schools such as Hendriken (sp?), La Salle, etc. Just by looking at the schools you can see a big difference. A child that goes to a working class school, most of the time won't be nearly as proficient as a child who goes to an executive elite school. This can be the result of a plethora of things. Maybe the child doesn't feel safe going to school, so it's not a good learning experience. Maybe the staff at a working class school really don't want to be there, and are not doing a very good job. Just from service learning I realized that if a teacher is absent some days in a working class school, the children may just be put into another classroom and given busy work to do. That would never happen at an executive elite school. I'm willing to bet some of the substitutes at EE schools are more qualified than some of the full time teachers at these working class schools. Even in the middle class schools, there is still a difference from EE schools. For example, my girlfriend went to Mount. I went to Burrillville High School. In my comparative scenario I would say Mount is EE and Burrillville would be middle class. The things that she would do in some of her science labs were things that I didn't have available to me until college. I felt like she had a better opportunity to gain knowledge during those years of our lives than I did. I feel like these differences can be seen throughout all of the different levels/classes of education.
Here is a VIDEO explaining the difference between n affluent professional school and an executive elite school.
Questions/Comments/Points to Share:
I know we have a wide variety in class of schools that people went to. Do you think the school you went to better or lessened your opportunity to learn?
I get you I was also really confused while reading this only because it was really jumpy here and there. But that is true looking at all the public schools in RI compared to the private there is a huge difference. To be honest the first time I passed by La Salle academy I thought it was a college because of how nice it looked on the outside. A lot of the public school are a bit run downed. Either way great blog!
ReplyDeleteGreat blog,, i enjoyed this piece because it broke down the class system within the education system. I went to several high schools, including EP, CF, and Cranston East. I did notice that the larger schools had more course offerings, such as AP classes and language classes. The students were actually meaner in the better schools.
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