Multiple topics and reference list structure

¶ … beautiful English, Rose is an example f someone whom the school system had initially written off and who, through a series of luck and an impressive teacher, ended up as a professor, a writer, and a poet amongst his other qualifications. Rose, was the son of Italian immigrants. Due to his parents unfamiliarity with the school system, he was placed in the lower track class with prejudiced and incompetent teachers as well as with students who were "a dangerous miscellany of surfers and hodads and South-Central blacks "

Some of the students were gifted. Many of them should not have been in this lower track class for even though not good in one subject, they were apparently good in another. Examples of these are. Dave Snyder, "a sprinter and halfback [whose] quick wit gave him a natural appeal" and the philosophically minded Ted Richards boy whose "textbooks were Argosy and Field and Stream, whatever newspapers he'd find on the bus stop - from the Daily Worker to pornography - conversations with uncles or hobos or businessmen he'd meet in a coffee shop, the Old Man and the Sea. With hindsight, I can see that Ted was developing into one of those rough-hewn intellectuals whose sources are a mix of the learned and the apocryphal, whose discussions are both assured and sad." These kind of boys were labeled 'stupid'...

The problem with the traditional school system is that it is too categorical in too many aspects. It defines knowledge in too narrow a manner and reaching for a certain standard demands that all others grope for that standard too and whoever doesn't attain that standard is penalized with neglect, disregard, relegation to a status that defines him as 'dunce' material, and to self-humiliation and abuse from both teachers and peers.

Many of these students, however, who receive that treatment may be smart in a different form of knowledge, and their being called stupid may act, as Rose so vividly described, as a type of twisting "the knife in your own gray matter to make this defense work." It may and does - shatter their esteem for life.

The title of the story "I just wanna be average" indicates the impact that labeling and prejudice can have on a person.

All this fine talk about fulfilling your potential, persevering, using your talents, and so forth is fine for those who have been given the resources and opportunities, but those who are constantly put down, relegated to bigotry and abuse, and placed in schools where illiterate and uneducated teachers are the norm have to go through tremendous odds to gain themselves an education.

There are numerous children who everyday due to the incidents of upbringing that include circumstances form fundamentalist and rigid religion that proscribes education to penury that makes education impossible -- all these and other circumstances irrevocably place otherwise gifted children in circumstances that may be hard for them to raise above and that may intellectually and psychologically stunt them for life.

Rose was lucky. It was chance that placed him in the 'dud' class, and it was chance that plucked him out. As he himself writes: "Kids at that level rarely cross tracks. The telling thing is how chancy both my placement into and exit from Voc. Ed. was; neither I nor my parents had anything to do with it."

he was lucky too that a dedicated and gifted teacher came his way who recognized his skills and effort fully interceded on his behalf.

If not for Jack MacFarland, Rose may never have gone onto Loyola or become the kind of person that he became today.

In contrast, Richard Rodriquez's memoir "the achievement of desire" derogates education and amplifies the true value of the 'ordinary' person that is often overlooked...

The two articles have one thing in common: both indicate that there is more thantn one kind of knowledge and that we do ill by abrogating people's capacities and skills to a Western construct of 'knowledge'.

The conventional school system, at least in the Western world, perceives 'knowledge' to be comprised of certain skills in certain subjects at a certain level that they rate to be applicable This they have pronounced to be the 'norm' and so anything that rises or falls beyond it at either of the two perimeters is adjudged 'abnormal' and the individual suffers as a result.

Rodriguez was the prodigy. His parents and their acquaintances treated him as such. They treated him as the 'scholarship child', but the ';scholarship child' was retreating more and dmore form his parents' simple ways. His education made him so.

Again we have that implication of the philosophical complications of what a true education or true 'knowledge' consists of. We have th incident of the 'Miss America' who proudly announces that she is going to college to study 'Fine Arts'. Is 'Fine Arts' more useful and more admirable than the practical work that Rodriguez's father learned? And could Rodriguez father have learned more had he gone to university? For that matter, why is one style knowledge considered more important than the fast typing or the sanitation skills that Rodriguez's father acquired? Today, business skills are considered an educational achievement. They weren't always so. May not 'knowledge' therefore, or at least socially credentialed knowledge depends on the fads of the time...