What Strong and Positive Actions Can School Take to Help Solve the Problems of Youth

¶ … strong and positive actions can school take to help solve the problems of youth?

The poet Langston Hughes once asked if the proverbial "dream deferred" of a young person's thwarted ambition in life "dried up like a raisin in the sun" or "does it explode?" Perhaps it does not matter so much what metaphor is most apt to explain this phenomenon, but how to prevent such a deferment from occurring in the first place. In Chapter 14 of the educational anthology of essays entitled Kaleidoscope, perhaps to suggest the dizzying array of solutions offered to the even more overwhelming amount of problems faced by today's educators, Stanley Eitzen attempts to offer some answers to the poet Hughes' rhetorical question.

Eitzen's essay "Problem Students: The Sociocultural Roots" posits the idea that so-called 'problem students,' contrary to much of current educational fashion today, do not simply have problems in school because of biological or genetic reasons, such as attention-deficit disorder. Rather, student's problems with the authority structure within the educational system have profound sociological and cultural roots. However, Eitzen states that blame should not be the issue. Rather than arguing who is at fault, constructive solutions to address the inequalities of society must be enacted that aid students experiencing such difficulties in the here and now.

Educational authority James Banks similarly suggests in the same anthology that culture is at the root of the difficulties so many young individuals experience. Banks writes in his own essay in the anthology Kaleidoscope, as a kind of drawing-together of the theorists presented in the text, including Banks, that multicultural education is not an academic form of Balkanization but a way of making "many" students into "one," in the spirit of the American motto of e pluribus Unum. This harkens back to Eitzen's idea that education must stress individual student's personal and collective responsibility to achieve, but also the school system's important role in making students feel part of a specific, localized community that values their own individual difference. Problem students in particular often feel atomized, and use their chronic misbehavior and 'acting out,' or use the method of withdrawing through frequent absences or poor academic performance, as a way of making themselves heard though aggressive or passive and negative behavior. Multicultural education that stresses cultural differences and acknowledges those differences offers students a positive way of evaluating their cultural contributions and differences in a society they may perceive as rejecting them. It also incorporates students' home cultures into the educational environment, thus validating the institution of public American education.

Multicultural and diversity-oriented education, Eitzen would caution, cannot begin and end within school walls. The educational process must take place within the student's home environment as well. Thus, rather than simply ask, as Eliot Eisner does in his article "The Kind of Schools we Need?" what sort of specific objectives do we as an American society wish to achieve within our educational context, American educators must ask what sort of society, holistically, must America become, to enable more students to see the value of education? What must America do to make students wish to be educated, and to see themselves as valued members of a school community?

Carl Glickman notes that over the course of his own education, different teachers used different methodologies, some quite interactive, others more authorial. It was not so much the specifics of the educational procedure, although Glickman admits he preferred more interactive approaches to education. Rather it was the extent to which he perceived educators as concerned individuals, involved in his life and the lives of his fellow students.

Ultimately, sociologist D. Stanley Eitzen traces poor behavior to young people who have lost their dreams for life after school. "Without a dream we become apathetic.... Without a dream and the hope of attaining it, society becomes our enemy." (Eitzen 1992). In other words, students will invest nothing in a community if they believe that their school community has given nothing to themselves, nor made any investiture in the culture of their parents and peers. If they can envision no positive rewards for subjecting themselves to the often-laborious academic process, then students will not press themselves to excel. Quite often students who come from challenged or difficult home backgrounds have other obstacles their wealthier or more comfortable peers in suburbia do not have. They do not have access to tutors, to parents with free time to help them with homework, or even parents who care about them and value education.

This is not because their parents are bad parents, quite often it is because society has given little impetus to these children's parents to view education as a worthwhile investment of time and labor, as opposed to immediately remunerative jobs. Sometimes even this is not even the case, and parents find themselves caught in a cycle of welfare dependence, because the working world has similarly been discriminatory and unrewarding as was their own educational environment. Also, student's peers, even when students come from more supportive home environments, can also create a culture and climate both within and without of school walls that fosters as sense of disenfranchisement.