The American education system is socially engineering minorities into accepting the role and doctrine that America has deemed appropriate for them.
THESIS: The American education system is socially engineering minorities into accepting the role and doctrine that America has deemed appropriate for them.
DEFENSE: The American school system plant seeds of patriotism in every school child. They teach history only from their own viewpoint, instead of teaching historical fact. An example of this is the teaching that the European ancestors of this country were heroic pioneers, but they are less likely to teach that these same heroic pioneers slaughtered massive numbers of Native Americans and stole their land (p.329, 330).
They use these kinds of tactics to “Americanize” minorities, trying to make them think of themselves as U.S. citizens, support American democratic ideal, and become assimilated into the mainstream of U.S. culture. This “Americanization” looks more like cultural imperialism, the practice of making minorities accept the dominant group’s culture. It involves forcing the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture on U.S. citizens of other backgrounds. The typical U.S. textbook is written from the WASP point of view so that it presents mostly whites as heroes, and very few heroes from minority groups. Americanization also forces minority children to give up their heritage, which encourages teachers to stereotype minority students as culturally deprived. This causes low self-esteem in minority children at an early age being culturally raped, and being taught little or nothing about their heritage and history (p.331).
Teachers also do their part in making sure that the minorities know and fulfill their roles in American society. We tend to behave the way we think others see us, thus in classroom interaction how the teacher defines a student can have powerful consequences for the student’s academic performance. The power the teacher holds on the performance of a student reflects the Pygmalion effect, the impact of a teacher’s expectations on student performance. This does not
DEFENSE: The American school system plant seeds of patriotism in every school child. They teach history only from their own viewpoint, instead of teaching historical fact. An example of this is the teaching that the European ancestors of this country were heroic pioneers, but they are less likely to teach that these same heroic pioneers slaughtered massive numbers of Native Americans and stole their land (p.329, 330).
They use these kinds of tactics to “Americanize” minorities, trying to make them think of themselves as U.S. citizens, support American democratic ideal, and become assimilated into the mainstream of U.S. culture. This “Americanization” looks more like cultural imperialism, the practice of making minorities accept the dominant group’s culture. It involves forcing the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture on U.S. citizens of other backgrounds. The typical U.S. textbook is written from the WASP point of view so that it presents mostly whites as heroes, and very few heroes from minority groups. Americanization also forces minority children to give up their heritage, which encourages teachers to stereotype minority students as culturally deprived. This causes low self-esteem in minority children at an early age being culturally raped, and being taught little or nothing about their heritage and history (p.331).
Teachers also do their part in making sure that the minorities know and fulfill their roles in American society. We tend to behave the way we think others see us, thus in classroom interaction how the teacher defines a student can have powerful consequences for the student’s academic performance. The power the teacher holds on the performance of a student reflects the Pygmalion effect, the impact of a teacher’s expectations on student performance. This does not