How Gender and Race Can Affect Education
By Lira Ndifon
In my presentation, I will focus on “Race, Gender, and Education.” I will analyze two readings that show how race and gender can affect your education and other people’s beliefs towards you.
In “Keepin It Real” by Carter Prudence, in chapter three “Between A Soft and A Hard Place” she talked about how girls are better achievers than boys in school despite the fact that boys are usually better than girls in math and science.
In school, females are more likely to be A or B students, while males are more likely to earn C grades. Black men and Latino men struggle with doing well in school more than black and Latina women do. In the United States and other industrialized countries such as England, women attain higher levels of education than men. In “Unequal Schooling: Race, Gender Disparity in Urban Education.”
A Newsweek cover story announces that Black women have outpacedBlack men in professional and managerial careers, with almost a quarter of Black women holding high paying jobs than 17 percent of Black men.” Nancy Lopez agrees with Carter Prudence that in urban schools there is a gender gap in education. About 10 to 15 years ago 8.4 million women enrolled in U.S. colleges, compared to 6.7 million men, even though there were slightly More college-aged men than women in the population at the time.” Men and women often have different experiences at school.
Black and Latino men experience institutional expulsion, where women experience the process of simultaneous institutional engagement and oppression. “Girls are often encouraged to believe that they were “book” smarter, too. Women are told that they have to have the educational background to be considered or recognized as smart. Women are mostly the vast majority of students in honors classes. It was predicted that the gender gap will reach 2.3 million in 2009. In an urban school in NY City, “In 2000, 44% of Latinas graduated compared to the 35% of Latino men; 49% of women African Americans graduated versus 39% of black men.” To close this gap we have to look beyond just the classrooms. As a society, we need to rethink what we consider smart.
One way the education system is failing many students is by limiting them to valued grade point averages. Classroom settings are not the best learning environments for every person, which also sets boundaries on children’s learning potential. GPAs can cause a student to feel like they are not smart enough to apply for an elite college or apply for college at all. We need to stop institutional oppression and racism in urban schools if we are to see any improvement in the educational gap. Stop forcing students straight out of high school to choose what they want to do, or pick a career path with our experiencing life. It does not make sense, to ask a teenager to make a life decision without life experience. At that age, you are still trying to figure out who you are. Pressuring students to have their life figured out at such early age only leads to high depression.
In my opinion, the high school curriculum does not prepare students to be ready for the real world. We need to encourage them to focus on things they are interested in instead of focusing on a grade letter. Our education system needs to encourage kids to want to learn instead of encouraging them to pass classes. Many students in urban schools have the potential to be great students, but because of how the education system is set up it limits the opportunities they are exposed to. I believe the reason why most men do not continue their education is that they have to provide for their families. Maybe if the cost of college wasn’t so high, the gap between race, gender, and education won’t be so bad.
Also, Mental health classes should be integrated into our school’s curriculum, too. We need to start teaching children how to express their emotions from a young tender age. Also, urban schools need to hire more teachers that look like the student population and teachers that can relate to the students.
