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

A Personal Experience in the United States Socializing FunctionMy subordinate/senior high schooldays was public. It served the surrounding four towns with a full student population of about seven hundred. In rural Vermont we were limit aside and sheltered from the pain and suffering of the citys ghetto, as well as trained to ignore the poverty right before our eyes next 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 alfresco world. Here our attention must be focused on the school work learning what the institution deemed important. My U.S. history class is a spotless example of this we learned what the teacher taught, and what the textbook covered, but what of all told the breeding 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 screw? We learned about the criminal Nazis concentration camps extensively, but only moved(p) 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 fussy brand of such bamboozlement patriotic mindlessness is the product being sold. more or less 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 support to, wa nt more than what our school was giving them already. But who has the right to emollient and choose what information shall be given out , and what information shall endure obscure? In looking back on my six farseeing years committed to this high school I can phone numerous instances in which I found myself confronting the institution, yet never displace enough.