Module Two Part II Blog

 Part II of the text introduced to the highs and lows of the schooling system. We see school as being a burden to kids who fail, while kids who do well in school benefit greatly from attending. We saw schools serve as a residential complex for poor people on weekends. We even saw school have an influence on our troops in war. School is a privilege that we have that we sometimes take for granted. It is a blessing to be able to receive an education that sets us up for the rest of our life. 

Early in Part II the text mentioned immigrants and their experience in the American school system. Writer Alfred Kazin and his parents immigrated to Brooklyn, New York. he said he hated school because he was not a very good student. He was terrible at math and described it as a terror. Spanish immigrants talked about how they would get a strong scolding and a swat, or spank from the teacher if they got caught speaking Spanish in class. A factory inspector caught kids working when they legally should have school. The inspector asked them if they would rather be working or be in school. 500 children were asked this, and 80% of them said they would rather be working in a factory than go to school. 

We saw two totally different styles of teaching, “toe the line” and a style of getting the kids moving around and attending classes they actually wanted to attend and enjoy. The “toe the line” method was one that expected the kids to come up and recite verbatim what the teacher had just taught. Meanwhile, another style had the kids moving from class to class every hour to switch subjects. There would be classes like auto mechanics, animal husbandry, art and nature classes. The children said that there was so much going on besides their regular classroom work that it was actually lovely to go to school and they thoroughly enjoyed it. 

School served as way more than just a place to learn the three Rs. The poor benefited from school in regards to learning about health and hygiene. They did not have plumbing or sanitary facilities, so they came into school to get cleaned up. Schools had swimming pools to serve as baths for these people. Schools stayed open at night and on weekends to serve the entire community. Schools were integrated with people of vastly different ages, which does not really happen today outside of college courses. Sometimes students in classes spoke eight or ten or fifteen different languages. Schools also required students to recite passages from the Bible. This was tough because they were crossing cultural barriers. Some students were unfamiliar and uncomfortable with partaking in this. Schools brought us the idea of I.Q. tests. These tests opened the doors to scholarships and schools coming to find you to get you to attend their school. Schools went as far as holding defense drills to prepare children for enemy attack during the Cold War era. 

This part of the text showed us how schools made it a point to teach more than just the three Rs. They used inventions like audiovisual aids and taught children's things like hygiene, family life, and health. School was more than just pen and paper back then. It is crazy to see school barely even use pen and paper today, as everything is done on ipads or laptops. All these ways are the variety of the ways we educate our children, whether it be American kids, Spanish, rich, poor, etc. in regards to who school benefits and fails, I really do not see a world in which school fails people. Obviously back then when there were language barriers and major gaps between the rich and poor we saw struggles, but other than that school is a benefit for everyone. Yes kids will hate it and claim they hate it and never want to go to school, but sooner or later they will realize how much of a blessing school is. No matter how long it takes you to learn something, pick up on certain subjects/classes you will eventually get it. As a group we pretty much hit the nail on the head, agreeing with exercising student involvement, stopping the “toe the line” method, and the triumph school showed by hosting immigrants to clean them up and provide them a home away from home. School is for anyone and everyone.