The topic of this week’s course is education and the educational system. One of the articles for this week deals directly and theoretically with this topic. This article is “Bad boys: Public schools in the making of black masculinity” by Ferguson. Ferguson discusses the education system in the 1990s that discriminated against black male students, resulting in them being marginalized and increasing their chances of criminal activities and arrest.
The author of this article talks about her research at Rosa Parks Elementary School, in which she studied the principles of the educational system work. Ferguson’s main goal was to observe teachers and staff’s interaction with children of different races and the application of punishment and motivation to them. The main research method was observation and interviewing of students, although Ferguson also uses other authors’ research to expand and strengthen her argument. As a result of observations, the author concluded that black male students are more likely and more severely punished than white students and have fewer encouragements for learning. Ferguson’s other finding is that this bias towards black boys as future criminals increases their marginalization and indeed raises their chances of going to prison. This situation occurs because suspension from school and being in the Punishment Room takes away from students the time they could spend in the classroom for learning and increases their knowledge gaps. These gaps forces black men to leave school, and a lack of education prevents them from getting good jobs and leads to different social problems.
In addition, Ferguson notes that unfair treatment in schools leads to the same attitude in the judicial system; thus, black men are more often arrested and more severely punished than white people for the same offenses. In conclusion, the author says that the only way to solve this problem is to reform the education system, as well as to eliminate racism in society. Thus, the author’s findings are consistent with this week’s concepts, such as Rosenthal and Jacobson’s symbolic interactionist study, which suggest that teachers’ attitudes affect student success, and education’s latent function to convey social norms to students.