Schools: Episode 2

This episode was really really interesting to me, as both a future educator and a history major, to learn so much about the history of the American school system. While there were some parts of the history that I knew and was aware of, there were some parts of it that I had never heard of before. For example, parts of the school’s treatment of immigrant students. I knew that when children came to America from other countries, they were put into American schools, I didn’t know just how “Americanized” that they were forced to be. Some people interviewed in the video recalled being spanked or punished when they would speak in languages that weren’t English and how no classes were offered in their native languages. This discrimination of non American non white students continued with tracking students based on IQ and other standardized tests that are inherently racially and culturally biased.

Another really interesting part of this episode, that I did know some about, was the gender bias that
existed in schools at this time. Hearing women in the video talk about how they were forced to take classes about being homemakers and encouraged to learn how to take care of families and babies, as opposed to men being able to take more career driven classes. This was after the change from lecture, pontification based classes to a more “learning by doing” approach that was supposed to help students learn more in school, but by forcing women to take home economics based classes, it was hindering them from reaching their full potential as students.