Equality in Education: A Summary of Three

Equality in Education: a Summary of Three Articles

Gerry Someone

EQUALITY IN EDUCATION

EQUALITY IN EDUCATION

Answering My Sister's Question: The Critical Importance of Education for Diversity in Those Spaces Where We Think We Are All the Same

Issues of racism and segregation are fairly well documented in the United States, whereas Canada is not generally known for having any problems of the sort, now or ever. That is what is addressed in the article by Michael Corbett. The author's sister asked a question that, for him, symbolized the relationship Canadians, or more specifically, Nova Scotians have with the issue of discrimination; she asked, "When were schools desegregated in Nova Scotia?"

The author first makes the point that although "officially" schools were desegregated in 1954, that doesn't necessarily mean anything changed for those schoolchildren on the receiving end of discrimination. More than five decades later, segregation remains in stark, unacknowledged effect. The problem stems from habitual exclusion ingrained in the social practices of Canadians and think that segregation is a "their problem," not an "our problem." For many people, the idea of racism has become tied up in geography where south means closed-minded conservatism and north means open-minded liberality.

Canada is seen as the paragon of educational equality because large-scale, standardized measures blur the separation of minorities. Additionally, in Nova Scotia, higher education is extremely expensive because of the lack of public funding, barring the poorer minorities from admission. The author sees this in the students he teaches to be teachers. They don't know why they should care about social equity when everyone they see is the same. People look to careers in teaching and law because they are "predictable spaces of codified truth" (Corbett, 2010, p. 13). They're comfortable; they're secure. That comfort and habitual misperception of social equity easily transform into racism. The author concludes that the answer to his sister's question about the desegregation of Nova Scotian schools is not 1954, but not yet.

A Talk to Teachers

A much older account of discrimination in education comes from a talk given by James Baldwin in 1963. He paints a menacing picture of danger coming from within the United States -- racism. Baldwin says responsible citizens, and teachers in particular, need to be willing to "go for broke" (para. 1) in order to turn the tide of inequity.

The author sets up his argument by making two assertions that create a paradox: first, that the purpose of education is to create thinking people who will look at the world and make their own judgments and their own decisions; and second, that society has no desire to have people who can think for themselves stirring people up with new ideas.

Black children born in the U.S. grow up thinking they live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, yet they are also assured that they are worthless members of that society with nothing to contribute. This becomes part of their subconscious when they are young and it is when a black child enters school that "he discovers the shape of his oppression" (para. 4). The author gives the example of going down Park Avenue from Harlem into downtown Manhattan. Same street, but the difference was night and day, black and white. It was clear to the author as a boy that he did not belong in the clean streets and rich buildings. A black person entering one of those buildings was expected to be delivering something and had to go to the back door, never saying anything more than "Yes Sir" and "No Ma'am." That kind of habitual expectation of subservience engenders a dangerous rage.

Slavery didn't end with abolition; it just moved from the South to the North; from the masters to the bosses. But as a black himself, Baldwin did not think of himself the way white people saw him, and if he wasn't what he was told he was, then white people weren't either. That is the crisis because equality between blacks and whites is upsetting the nation's sense of self. But that is what needs to be done.

Teachers teaching black children have a responsibility to expose the inequities for the criminal machinations that they are -- expose the ideals of heroic American ancestry as myths and teach the children that they are stronger than conspiracy that binds them.

Science and the Origin of Race

The science of race, according to John Willinsky, had been grossly inaccurate since its inception and was mostly discredited by the latter half of the twentieth century. The science of race is basically that races are created by biological differences and this biology can somehow prove one race's superiority or inferiority. Race was never really cause for concern until Gobineau claimed that society would be destroyed by diluting the race with foreign elements. This philosophy is said to have inspired Hitler's Aryan race ideology.