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- Title
The Cultural Politics of Educational Inequality: Discarding the Prevailing Eurocentric Formulations of Academic Failure.
- Authors
Agbo, Seth A.
- Abstract
Western media frequently reports on the low academic achievement of minority students in dominantly White societies. The argument primarily focuses on the failure of minority students to reach equivalence with their mainstream counterparts, noting the inability of minority students to attain academic success within the educational framework provided by mainstream society. Recent school reforms have called for more comprehensive appraisal of curriculum and learning content that may incidentally lead to minority student success in schools. This quite basic postulate of failure, which in itself makes no assumptions about cause and effect but only with comparison with mainstream White students, is rather sketchy and inconclusive, especially in respect of the fact that minority students resist learning mainstream content. The unarticulated fact is that many minority youngsters deliberately choose not to learn what is taught in school. The refusal to learn helps these youngsters to build a small secure world in which their feelings of being rejected by mainstream society can be lessened. Our experiences show that research, development of instructional techniques or materials, special programs or compensatory services, and restructuring have not made any fundamental difference for minority students. This chapter addresses the realities of education for minority students from an experiential, cultural perspective, discarding the prevailing formulations of failure, notably those that assume that minority students are incapable of academic achievement as their mainstream counterparts.
- Subjects
EDUCATIONAL equalization; EDUCATION &; politics; MINORITY students; TEACHING; LEARNING; SCHOOL failure; UNDERACHIEVERS
- Publication
At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, 2010, Vol 72, p3
- ISSN
1570-7113
- Publication type
Article