What are the major influences that shape schools? A possible contributing factor affecting what schools are like is public opinion about what particular schools; urban, suburban, and rural should be like. This idea extends past the schools to an overall vision of how people perceive the culture surrounding the particular areas. To explore this concept we may explore some of the factors that shape the dominant views of American culture. Including the idea of a romanticizing of the America’s rural past, the rejections of urban centers, because of the conflict with America’s vision of it’s past, and finally explore the implications of these conflicts regarding the problems that affect urban centers and schools.
American culture often constructs it’s identity in the past, romanticizing the old simple life. Urban centers conflict with this cultural identity of the rural American past. Urban centers are heterogeneous entities, with big minority and immigrant populations. They are associated with industrialization and are the not green spaces, directly contradicting with the cultural vision of America’s past as a homogenous entity, comprised of white Anglo-Saxon, Protestants, living the simple life in the wide-open spaces of America. Copland, the great American composer defined his sound, the American sound with the use of the wide-open interval of the Perfect fifth. This notion of the boundless open-spaced America is undoubtedly engrained in the American psyche. In contrast to this openness, the urban center is a place that is dense and full.
We can find some significance in this rejection of the urban center and see how it has contributed to the formation of the suburbs. Families in essence get “the best of both worlds” the proximity to the city, for work and the green, country spaces for their children. The suburbs are regarded as safe places for children to receive their education. This has caused white families to leave the cities and in effect contributed to the re-segregating of our schools. It is interesting to see how some of the problems that affect urban schools can be attributed to the cultural differences between the dominant American culture and the cultures of the minority students in urban centers. Because if this conflict the needs of students in urban centers are not being met. Students are forced to chose between adapting their own cultural identities or having to reject education entirely.
These are just a few thoughts relating to what factors shape our school. We should recognize that how our schools are shaped is greatly impacted by the cultural identity of America, and in the particular case of urban schools, the conflicts that urban centers present with this American cultural identity.
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I concur with the statement made that "American culture often constructs it’s identity in the past, romanticizing the old simple life. Urban centers conflict with this cultural identity of the rural American past." Americans love and take pride in their history and in the traditions they have continued to practice since the very beginning. With that being said, change--in any form, upsets the American mindset that has dominated the majority of Americans. Integration of the schools upset many of the white Americans who felt the need to aggressively reject the black families that were soon to be interacting with their children. The one advantage that whites had, one that allowed resegregation to occur, was that they had the economic and political power to move to a new environment or create situations where blacks were still kept separate. Even to this day, there are forms of segregation that still exist, both inside and outside of educational facilities.
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