Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Reading Texts Later

Cultural capital: the brainwashing material used in schools to shape the way students interact in life. Legitimate cultural capital: the “right” interpretation of the text and not the student’s personal thoughts or interpretation. When in middle school and beyond students are seen as teenagers who need one path of guidance. Many teachers are either taught or have guidelines that prohibit them from allowing a student to have his/her own minds outside the box. The box in this article seems to be school, which is the cultural oppression. Oppression itself sounds like an unhappy word which it is and for school to have that unhappy period in textbooks that depicts what students should be, and how they should think. Giroux speaks upon school being a political building, and I feel that the statement is true. Students are taught the different ways of ruling, but are mostly taught how democracy is the better than any other ruling method, and how democracy should be dominant throughout the world, but they rarely point out the problems that democracy has as well. In school children are taught there is only one way of thinking and it shows students the impression of how the world thinks of people and how we, as a democracy, should act. With everything put on teachers, especially English teachers, they are looked at as Giroux says “ responsible for advancing the knowledge and values to historical Western cultures. It is made important that we transform our students into what society thinks is good for t world, but they do not seem the harm we are able to do. Teaching a student that they should be a housewife because over 90% of stories are about women stuck in the house taking care of it and the children, that when students get to a certain age they sometimes get confused of what they would like to be. It makes students stay within the box of “safety” such as career wise. In more ways than one students are pushed to believe in one way of doing something. We, students are taught that democracy is a one way track that we as American citizens are to be on and if we somehow are not agree on things we become terrorists. The American way of teaching schools has become a representation of what we want to believe and not of what we interpret something meaning. The way people are taught throughout English classes in all grades seems fake. We seem to not learn about different cultures and different ways of living until we reach a college level and we have an opinion about what we would like to take. America seems so scared to introduce students into a international view that they shape our children through literature brainwashing.

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