School

            I have spent sixteen out of my twenty years on this planet, in school. At age four I entered preschool and now at age twenty-two, as I embark upon my first year in graduate, school has become second nature to me. Besides my family and friends, school has been the one aspect of my life that has remained constant. In a general sense I hardly ever give it a second thought. Yet on a more specific level, I am constantly buried under an exam for one class, or a difficult lesson in another. It is only when I do begin to reflect upon my formal education in a broader sense that the topic of equality arises. And in thinking about it as a theme that has run throughout my years as a student, I have come to only one conclusion: Equality is a concept that is supposedly taught to us as an early age, but ironically can never be achieved within the very schools we attend. On my very first day of elementary school, my Kindergarten teacher introduced herself to the class and shared with us what her aspirations were for the upcoming school year. She listed such things as counting, painting, and she even mentioned reading. Her assumption was that everything that she had to teach us had not already been learned by some of the children, and furthermore she assumed that everyone would have the ability to succeed in all that she had planned. Although I can trust that all of her intentions were innocent and that she meant well, she allowed our entire class to begin its education on unequal ground. This was nothing that I thought about at the time, yet I do remember feeling anxious about reading while my best friend had already been doing so for a couple of years. This leads me to the argument that equal opportunity does not lead to equal results (a question which arises in E.D. Hirsch's book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them). My best friend and I both had the equal opportunity to learn how to read, yet she already knew how to, where as I had barely begun.