Friday, February 5, 2010

Week 2: Class Discussion-Society's vicious cycle.

This past week I was forced to really stop and think to myself about the implications of the patterns in society. Often times, people can look at students who are subject to growing up in a rough area, with schools that are not the greatest. Someone on the outside, one who has not tried to walk in another's shoes, can wonder "why don't these people just DO something to change their lives? Why don't they simply try harder in school like my children do?". Yet, it takes the mind of someone objective-who humbly approaches the situation, realizing they know little about the situation, to realize the cycle these individuals may be caught in.
Sometimes being less fortunate can land a family in a less than favorable neighborhood. This causes the student to go to a school that possibly does not have enough funding or the best teachers. The school does not have this funding because of the quality of teaching, and possibly the atmosphere. It is not ALL the teachers and school systems' faults-but it does play a part. Because the students and these schools are not set up to win, they do not...creating the cycle of lower expectations and less funding.
It takes someone, such as a social entrepreneur, to come into a situation like this and see it from another perspective...to see this as an opportunity to change a cycle...instead of a hopeless situation. All of this was inspired by our classroom discussion surrounding school systems, Steven Burbage's thoughts on the effects of "bad" teachers. It has been inspiring to see trials through the eyes of the entrepreneurs in the books, realizing it really does take an "unreasonable" person to change the world, someone who sees the world in a completely different way.

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