Brain and Education Web Paper 1

After American football and its military, the United States’ higher education system is perhaps the pride of the country. More indicative of the importance of this education system is that it is the envy of the rest of the world. There are boarding schools in foreign countries solely dedicated to get their students accepted into the top tier American colleges and universities. The Ivy League colleges and their peers are factories that take in “successful” students and churn out “successful” students that are wired to have “successful” careers and lead “successful” lives.

             There is a lot that can be said about the current state of education. There is a lot to be said about what is wrong with the current state of education. In particular, there is still a lot to say about different types of inequalities apparent within the classroom. While I could talk about racial or socioeconomic inequalities, I would like to focus on the gender inequalities of males and females. Even more specifically, I will argue that these gender inequalities are brought about through the ways in which people (teachers, students, etc.) have been socialized to look at gender and education and the fact that males and females just learn differently.

   It can be argued that the U.S. has created and maintained a culture of black males who feel trapped in the stereotypes of society and therefore often fall into them. With no one expecting them to amount to anything but a statistic, African-American males subconsciously fulfill the roles of high school dropout, drug dealer, criminal, gangster, jock, and teen father. They continuously feed into a system that exploits rather than supports them.

           Co-constructive education liberates the students from having to worry about having an aim in mind. Students are free to explore knowledge and construct understandings on their own term. The hope is that this freedom will inspire new and creative ways of comprehending the world. One assumption behind this method of education is that knowledge is subjectively constructed. There is no single body of knowledge that necessarily grounds all understandings.

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 African American Student Mobility through Education: “You sound white…”

Know-How and Know-Why