Race and education are two things that seem to have a very large affect on each other. Race affects education because it affects the way that children are taught and the material that they are taught. Education affects race by teaching children what is in the textbooks, and whether it is biased information or not. Ideally, race would not affect education at all, and likewise, education would not affect race. However, that is very difficult to achieve. Most schools have some sort of class of culture in them, and they also have asymmetrical relationships of power. The teacher is going to be in power, and his or her ideas are going to be the most influential.
We need to be more focused on improving education for all cultures and America as a whole. One of the problems that we need to point out is the problem of autoethnographic texts. An autoethnographic text is one that "people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them." This is one way that education has an effect on race. I would agree that this is a problem in schools. I have a friend who works at my house and who has been there since I was real little who began in an all black school and enjoyed school. She always tells me stories about when she was in school. Then, during desegregation, she decided to go to an integrated school and found that knowledge became about information only. The black students were treated a different way, and therefore, they acted a different way. This is a big problem zone. The teacher has a very large affect on the student, whether it is good or bad.
The idea that I have is that every student in every school should be taught the same thing. In one book that I read in high school I remember it talking about the national literacy in America being far below what it should be. It also talks about the success of Japan because the "universally high level of literacy" in Japan.
