A Personal Experience in the United States Socializing Function :: Free Essays Online

A Personal Experience in the United States Socializing FunctionMy petty(prenominal)/senior high work was public. It served the surrounding four towns with a correspond student population of about seven hundred. In rural Vermont we were redact aside and sheltered from the pain and suffering of the citys ghetto, as well as trained to ignore the poverty right before our eyes attached door. Classes started at eight, and ended at two fifteen. Our windows were tinted black so we would be sure not to ever have a glimpse of the immaterial world. Here our attention must be focused on the school work learning what the institution deemed important. My U.S. history class is a completed example of this we learned what the teacher taught, and what the textbook covered, but what of all the tuition not included? It would be impossible for us to learn all the history of the United States, but who gets to decide what history we need to populate? We learned about the brutal Nazis concentrati on camps extensively, but only stirred upon our own equivalent imprisonment of the Japanese-Americans briefly. We learned of the fight against communism in Vietnam and Korea, but nothing of the mass slaughter of the common people in those countries that our country took part in. What is even more discouraging than this distortion of history, is that no one cared. Jonathan Kozol writes on page 37 of The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home Nationalistic education is a particular brand of such bamboozlement patriotic mindlessness is the product being sold. just about children buy it, unresistingly. The teacher did not want to teach anything that was not required, because if it was not required by the government then it must not be important enough information. The government would not dream of having such evil things in our history be required to be taught because it shows the student a weakness of the all powerful ruling class. And the students did not, and certainly were not sup port to, want more than what our school was giving them already. But who has the right to peck at and choose what information shall be given out , and what information shall outride obscure? In looking back on my six big years committed to this high school I can commemorate numerous instances in which I found myself confronting the institution, yet never push enough.