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

A Personal Experience in the United States' Socializing Function My junior/senior high school was public. It served the surrounding four towns with a total student population of about seven hundred. In rural Vermont we were set aside and sheltered from the pain and suffering of the city's 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 outside world. Here our attention must be focused on the school work; learning what the institution deemed important. My U.S. history class is a perfect example of this; we learned what the teacher taught, and what the textbook covered, but what of all the information 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 know? We learned about the evil Nazi's concentration camps extensively, but only touched 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 special brand of such bamboozlement; patriotic mindlessness is the product being sold. Most children buy it, unresistingly." The teacher did not want to teach anything that was not requ ired, 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 encouraged to, want more than what our school was giving them already. But who has the right to pick and choose what information shall be given out , and what information shall remain obscure? In looking back on my six long years committed to this high school I can recall numerous instances in which I found myself confronting the institution, yet never pushing enough.