Araceli Moya

30 August 2011

Why School?

The author from Why School? by Mike Rose has interesting topics about school. He is trying to reach out his points and pursue the title of his book title “Why School?” In the first chapter, he mentions a man with brain damage and his inspiration to grasp education regardless his disabilities. Mike Rose, writes about the how the government has the ambition to have the students succeed in the hard core classes for example, math, science, and english. In 2001 the act “No Child Left Behind” was established and recommended students attending school to take the test. This will provide statistics on how well the students are learning. Schools take time to teach the students on the materials that will be on the test just for them to get a high score. This process seems like if they are categorizing people in what they are good at. By the end, the result is the replication of troubling pattern in American Schooling: poor kids get an education of skills and routine…” (Rose 49) Like mentioned in class, children today are being numbed up by learning skills and are being taught how it should be done instead of learning in a broader perspective. They are given one way of learning like a routine and they don’t have options. When we are children we colored inside the lines until we were instructed to color inside the lines. At this point we were constricted to follow the idea of what is the right way to do it and have only one way to do it.

My experience in education has been an opportunity to expand my learnings. I am the first generation in my family to go to college and pursue a career. In my education career I have noticed that school does teach us the “correct” way to do things, but I also realized form the reading that we have different ways to get educated “ we are getting educated all the time, of course: by family, community, teachers, pals, bullies, and saints” (Rose 31). This concept is true, this shapes how we are and the way we think and view things.