(DOWNLOAD) "Honors and Class (Forum on "Social Class and Honors") (Viewpoint Essay)" by Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Honors and Class (Forum on "Social Class and Honors") (Viewpoint Essay)
- Author : Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 66 KB
Description
Since the l980s a steady stream of scholarly works has examined stratification along class lines in American education. A recent work on this subject is Tearing Down the Gates, by Peter Sacks, which won the Frederic W. Ness Book Award in January 2009. It draws a detailed portrait of changes in demographics over the past thirty years or so. His time line allows him to pinpoint a growing polarization that shows a severely reduced college population of students from low-income families, displaced by an enormous increase in students from affluent families on our college campuses. As his subtitle indicates, this shift in economic status is a challenge to "Confronting the Class Divide in American Education." Several aspects of this profile give pause. Although everyone is admitted to school in K-12, what Sacks and others he cites call "tracking" begins in pre-school. The kind of teaching offered to children from middle- and upper-income homes is radically different from that given to the poor. Books (too few); equipment (too little); class size (too large): all of these exacerbate the already weak position of children whose homes have no books, whose families have a minimal education, who live in spaces too small or too cramped to read or study.