Education

What is education? What is the role of education in America? What is the structure of American education? It is important to understand all of these questions before delving in on the issue of closing the American educational achievement gap between African and Caucasian Americans.
In traditional countries, education was disseminated through the family, tribe, or etc. In many cases, your parents taught you all that they knew, and you made your living from this. For example, if your father was a blacksmith, he taught you the trade, and then you took over the family business. As time progressed, however, this system became inept at disseminating all the information that one would need to become a productive member of society. That is where education through schooling came in play.
The school began to serve many purposes. Two widely accepted duties of schools were to allocate and socialize. The American government used schools to help socialize immigrants into the American culture. Through the amount of education that a person had received, they were then allocated into a social strata. But education has many more duties than to socialize and allocate, "...in the United States, education has been touted by governments and other groups as one of the principal means for creating social equality. ( Jonathan Turner, American Dilemmas, 145)"
A lot of controversy about education today revolves around the central issue of the previously mentioned quote, and of the main focus of this blog. Is America creating social equality through its education system, or is it continuing a downward cycle of inequity between races; an inequity known as the achievement gap.