affluent and poor comparably, the fact is that a student’s race at birth and social class have a bigger influence on social class in future life as compared than other factors, inclusive of merit and intelligence. Each child seems to access as many chances for academic achievement in school as his or her immediate family has money or wealth and also the extent to which they are privileged in their social status.
McLaren in his book Life in Schools; utilizes journal entries of his own teaching experience to depict the state of the education system in America, particularly the inequities of education in relation to the economically disadvantaged pupils. He deconstructs carefully the unspoken power structures and institutional oppression present…show more content… Being incarcerated to commercial-backed school privatization activists, modern school reform put teachers, teacher unions and public schools up to letdown by imposing culpability to them for poor student standardized test scores that are really the product of learners’ poor socio-economic status and associated ethnic and racial oppression. For the author, the fascination with test scores negatively affects critical thinking and imagination, lessening the classroom experience and curriculum around the insensible task of filling in the right bubbles underneath droves of totalitarian multiple-“choice” questions formulated in sociopathic and distant corporate cubicles. Learners turn into passive recipients of stringently limited information forced into their wits by teachers who are usually restricted from taking risks and planning their own lessons as the demands to produce high test scores bring into being highly regimented and scripted pedagogy. In this case, worksheets substitute critical teaching, while rote memorization replaces in-depth thinking. The students are thus incapable of facing political and moral challenges they encounter under modern state capitalism and associated oppression structures which exist outside and inside the…show more content… The book seeks to have dedicated teachers who are motivated to empower the students who are the future citizens and workers to become inspired, smart, courageous, confident, loving and understanding. The students will also be able to comprehend what the capitalist owners and their agents are doing to life and the society, but also to defy those capitalist elites and to come up with a democratic, egalitarian, peaceful, sustainable, and truly human world. The teachers should be able to conceptualize their role in fronting for a revolutionary transformation in school and in the society. McLaren opines that; “Schools are implicated in social reproduction…how schools perpetuate or reproduce the social relationships and attitudes needed to sustain the existing dominant economic and class relations of the larger society.” Determined to interrupt and overturn that deadly reproduction, they would grasp the “partial autonomy of the school culture” and the necessity of occupying that space as “a vehicle for political activism and creating a praxis of social equality, economic justice, and gender equality” (McLaren