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Electoral Politics > Features > Crenshaw Group Paper
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Crenshaw: A Community Civic Profile (cont.)
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To return to the beginning of the paper click here.
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Data Collection and Analysis How do youth participate civically? According to our research, youth, as well as other members of the society, participate civically within their community in various ways, positively and negatively. According to our observations, we most commonly see members of South Los Angeles civically engage in their community in a self-defeating manner. Self-defeating resistance is the traditional Norton of school resistance, according to Daniel G. Solorzano of University of California, Los Angeles and Dolores Delgado Bernal of University of Utah. “Self-defeating resistance refers to students who may have some critique of their oppressive social conditions but are not motivated by an interest in social justice. These students engage in behavior that is not transformational and in fact helps re-create the oppressive conditions from which it originated. Although the construct of self-defeating resistance acknowledges human agency, one might argue that it does so in a limited way by only considering a partial understanding of the system of oppression and demonstrating behaviors that can be destructive to oneself or others. Gerard, a local gang member of the South Los Angeles community, stated that although he and his fellow friends cause chaos in their neighborhood they stated that what they are doing does not help with the reputation of living in the hood. “We need to compromise more for each other, rather than trying to be selfish and self centered; help my brother out, put money in his pocket. Don’t call our women bitches. Women: Stop being materialistic and try to be mutual with your black brothers and try to establish something. If we can get together and establish something, it can happen. A lot of groups are group oriented, you can’t do shit by yourself.” Self-defeating citizens are those who drop out of school, who join gangs, and any other type of citizen whose actions contribute to the social problems the community faces today. Our survey proves that students are not taught to create comprehensive long-term systemic changes, instead they fall into the category of the self-defeating citizen. According to Joel Westheimer, of the University of Ottawa, and Joseph Kahne, of Mills College, “the personally responsible citizen acts responsibly in his or her community by, for example, picking up litter, giving blood, recycling, volunteering, and staying out of debt. This concept aligns well with the center-right perspective Miller outlined and the colonial concept of a good citizen as identified by Schudson. The personally responsible citizen works and pays taxes, obeys laws, and helps those in need during crisis such as snowstorms or floods. He or she might contribute time, money, or both to charitable causes. During our observations of the South Los Angeles community, we interviewed a number of community members who were personally responsible in their own way. Near the plaza, we conducted an interview with a woman name Caroline Preston who was in front of a grocery store accepting donations for the homeless. She, as well as other personally responsible citizens, believed that the government was not doing anything to help out their community. Instead of doing nothing about the situation, she took matters into her own hands by helping her community through charitable acts. “I am collecting funds for the poor to keep them clean, help with parents, and maintain some place stable.”
Participatory individuals of South Los Angeles engage their community civically. According to Westheimer and Kahne, “A participatory citizen is one who is prepared to engage in collective, community-based efforts. Educational programs designed to support the development of participatory citizens focus on teaching students about government and other institutions and about the importance of planning and participating in organized efforts to care for those in need, like efforts to guide school policies. Skills associated with such collective endeavors--such as how to run a meeting--are also viewed as important.” Unfortunately, due to lack of time, we were not able to conduct any interviews with any participatory community members. If we were to define the location of where a participatory citizen would most likely be, we would look in a student government class. Their curriculum deals with teaching them how to participate and organize. For example, how to run and organize programs or events in their school. What is missing in South Los Angeles schools are the teachers who come and want to save their community. A justice-oriented community member participates civically in their community by analyzing the root of an issue in their community and by critically looking for a solution for that particular problem. A justice-oriented citizen critically assesses social, political, and economic structures to see beyond the main surface areas. The vision the justice oriented citizen shares with the vision of the participatory citizen emphasizes the collective work related to the life and issues of the community. Educational programs that emphasize social change seek to prepare students to improve society by critically analyzing social issues and injustices. Such educational programs help mold a common citizen to become justice-oriented citizen. Justice-oriented members of the community are highly likely to be involved in community organizations that try to make their community better. Members of the Community Coalition, like Robert, state that the school curriculum must change. The way students are being taught in schools is not preparing them for the real world, they are not getting the skills they need help their community. The members of organizations like Community Coalition know how to organize and conduct meetings. They organize youth to demand for equality and for their denied rights. The justice oriented citizen, as well as the participatory and personally responsible citizens, civically engage in their community in a positive way, in contrast to the self-defeating citizen.
The actions of the self-defeating citizens of the community suggest that they seek a curriculum the school does not provide. If they do not find what they need at school, why would they stay there if they have nothing to gain from it? A number of those citizens drop out of school and join gangs where they feel they have a better support system that nurtures their maturity. The students feel powerless and unheard, so they go to gangs which satisfies their immediate desire for power and respect. South Los Angeles schools do not tap into the curriculum these self-defeating students need which are stripping them of their power. That is why gangs exist. In order for civic engagement to take place, students need to learn what civic engagement is, how to civically participate, and where to participate. According to our observations and analysis, youth, community, and justice-oriented curriculums are more engaged civically than the traditional notions of schooling. One location where youth learn to civically participate in their community is in their local communities. Peers and members of the community feel that having a well-paid job is the only essential necessity toward living a successful life. Youth fall for the ideology that having a good job is everything. They have been brainwashed to think about themselves and exclude others around them. According to our open-ended survey results, the majority of the students who answered the open-ended questions described that when they think of the word “politics,” the words that come to their mind are “adults” and “independence.” From the data we acquired from there, we saw that youth believe politics applies only to elders and adults that aren’t necessarily from their community. They feel that elders and adults of other communities have the power when it comes to politics. Members of the community let outsiders invade their community and let them restructure it in ways the outsiders want , instead of restructuring it to satisfy the needs of the local people of that community. They see that opening up places in the community leads to having jobs available as a good opportunity for their society. But in reality, opening stores gives the members the mindset of a good chance of a well-paid job, when it really just prevents them from building on their community according to their systemic needs that have to be satisfied. The peers that we interviewed mainly spoke about issues that deal with lack of jobs for people that live in the neighborhoods of high crime rates and low income. The law enforcement of the community shapes the way people think about their community and the way the members think about themselves. One student, Gerard, said,“We gotta be very sharp and keen to what we're doing because we could get arrested by the police, the police are very hot. I walked outside my house this morning and I couldn’t get two feet and the police were looking at me and I have to go tuck my I.D ‘cause I got warrants. Any young black male, it’s three strikes against you: young, black, male, If you’re a young black male your going to get messed with the police.” Gerard believes that law enforcements are not doing their job, that they harass “young, black males.” Deon, a South Los Angeles student, believes that “we should have another way to rehabilitate people. People go to jail and turn more ignorant.” All the signs are out in the open, so why do these conditions continue to occur?”
The mindset of the youth in the community is communicated through what the community sees as successful. According to the general community, gang members are successful. In the perspective of the system, gangs are not successful because they are dropouts. On the contrary, the community sees them as successful because it is the gangs of that particular community who have the power; it is the gangs of that community who have the respect of everyone else. Business owners are portrayed in the community as successful as well. When the community thinks of business owners, they think of opportunity. In this particular South Los Angeles community, joblessness is a serious major issue among all the members. Many members said that it was difficult getting a job if you were known for being a Black or Brown individual that lives in the hood. Management judges the individuals by the reputation of their community. Business owners are successful according to the community because they see the owners as highly successful and capable of sharing their success with the community by opening up a branch and by offering members the opportunity to work in that branch. Everyday workers of the working class or low income are viewed as successful. Although their job is barely enough to survive in the community, there are greater numbers of people in South Los Angeles who cannot get a job because of the reputation of their community. The community shapes the way people engage civically by defining to the youth and members what an unsuccessful member of the community looks like. The community defines a homeless person as unsuccessful. They have been squeezed by society so much that they live day to day on the streets. Low-waged careers are considered unsuccessful because the community conveys to the youth that if you stay in school, there is no way you will get a low-wage job in the future. A day laborer is seen as a last resort for a job in the community, the kind of job that needs no education. According to the South Los Angeles community of South Central, scholars and students are paradoxically considered as unsuccessful. If you have no support from the community, it gives others the message that they no longer deserve support. If someone offers you a helping hand in any situation and you turn it down, then they would be offended and draw the conclusion that you are better than them and no longer want to be apart of your community. If scholars and students have no support from the community, they will feel as if they have been cast aside from the community. Then they will leave their community in search of a better place where support is available to them and will never go back to their old community. The school mentality contributes to the students not coming back to their community. It is an “I over We” mentality that makes people selfish and careless of others. A student named Robert states, “You gotta be able to start thinking of ‘we’ versus just the ‘I’ and I think that was my mentality when I was growing up in my community is that it is all about how I am going to benefit? How am I going to benefit if I spend three hours at this meeting, what do I get out of it? Versus realizing by spending three hours at this meeting this week, and coming every single week, I am going to be a part of something else that is going to help everybody. That is the idea we should change to.” Robert states that this mentality that the community carries is holding the members of the community down and preventing them from conducting positive change in their communities. Gerard states that, “ If we can get together and establish something it can happen.” He also agrees that the ‘I’ mentality of the community is holding them down from establishing things in the community. Everyone has the need to establish something positive but they are held back because they think in terms of ‘I’ which contributes to them feeling discouraged and feeling alone in the operation. According to our survey data, the youth somewhat agreed that schools should provide students the opportunity to learn from people who are involved in addressing these issues. The media plays an essential role in the community when it comes to youth participating civically. The disappearance rate of students of Central High school from freshmen to senior year is staggering. It appears that many youth are not interested in college. Why is that the case? Perhaps because youth watch television and pay attention to the mainstream ideas of the mainstream media. The youth pay attention to those sitcoms where they see minority families who are rich and successful. The schools practically brainwash and manipulate students, but when they hear the phrase ‘brainwash,’ students can’t really connect that terminology with the school’s actions. A brainwashed person, according to television programs, acts like a zombie and has no control of what he or she is doing. In reality, the act of brainwashing is an act of manipulation. The media portrays, through movies, self-defeating resistance as the way to go. The media establishes gang movies that manipulate the viewer by showing them aspects of gangs that look interesting to youth. The media gives them the mindset that college is not that important because they get the the message that there are a lot of successful Brown and Black minorities when in reality there aren’t. If the media presented the community with the marginalized information of Brown and Black minorities, then the minorities would be influenced to go to college in spite of the system. Various organizations in the community shape the way individuals participate in their community politically. According to the organizations in South Los Angeles, the successful members of the community are the members who are concerned with the community’s health.. In the eyes of the organization, a successful member is one who does not think with the school mentality, but instead, they think in terms of ‘we’ over I, they are also the ones who recognizes social injustice and self hate. South Los Angeles organizations depict individuals who think that these issues are funny, as unsuccessful. They are seen as ignorant to what is going on in their community and have no motivation to get involved with their community. The organizations like Community Coalition believe that the school mentality has to be purged from the youth and replaced with thinking in terms of ‘we’ instead of ‘I.’ The people in the organizations discuss how they can get more youth to be involved with their organizations and programs offered. They find the system responsible for the conditions the community is in. They find the schools responsible for carrying out the system’s plan of social reproduction, which is a system that keeps the working class from reaching higher learning and that keeps the higher class on top of the game. The organizations find the society responsible for allowing the system’s plans to sink into the community. The community organizations primarily discuss matters and situations that must be addressed and fixed. The most effective way to communicate their ideas would be on school grounds. Representatives of their organizations could go to classrooms and try to reach out to the students that want and need the help. In the eyes of the organizations in South Los Angeles, the student is the learner. Not only the student who is interested, any other community member that wants to participate is also considered the learner. The members could call themselves learners because they teach the community members about the serious issues that must be addressed and the community members give the organization members some input on the conditions of the community. Like Freire states in First Letter, “There is no teaching without learning, and by that I mean more than that the act of teaching demands the existence of those who teach and those who learn. The learning of those who teach does not necessarily take place through their apprentices' reflection of their mistakes. There learning in their teachings is observed to the extent that, humble and open, teachers find themselves continually ready to rethink what has been thought and to revise their positions. The members of the organization teach youth and community members how to be active politically and the community members shape the organization's perspective on the community in a bit more detail. Each group, community and organization members, are always ready to teach as well as ready to learn. The primary learning activities for youth would deal with refining their skills of analysis and questioning. The individuals from the organization sites of South Los Angeles must know what issues and situations they are dealing with and must be able to know how to organize (meetings, etc.) The primary goal is to try to positively change the damaged communities in South LA. If the people of the organizations do not succeed, then the problems will continue to grow and everyone else will continue to not do anything about it but deal with it in a self defeating manner which contributes to the growing problems overall. South Los Angeles organizations pose a positive impact in their community.
The school site is one of the most complex and important sites where the youth learn to civically engage in their community, positively and/or negatively. The schools tell the students that buyers of the system are successful people of the community. Schools consider people who do not care about problems as good. That would explain why the school standards expect the student to discuss, describe, explain, and analyze history instead of questioning it. The schools tell students that a successful person obeys and does not question higher authority. In the perspective of the school, individualization is important. They feel that if you have difficulty with something, it is up to you to get yourself out of your dilemma. The schools consider history being told from a Eurocentric perspective essential. This affects the youth's attitude toward civic engagement. The South Los Angeles schools leave out a number of subjects that they believe are inappropriate. For example, they leave out the contents that refine the questioning and critical thinking skills that youth need to analyze the media. The schools primarily give the students work assignments that have to do with re-establishing what has just been established, without questioning the contents. If the schools continue to give work assignments in that nature, youth will not develop the skills to question their surroundings. According to our research, leaders of the system shape these activities, they have everything planned out to keep the working class down and to prevent it from amounting to anything better. According to the school, the student should only know what happened in history from a Eurocentric perspective and the student should not question anything. If all goes according to their plan, they should expect to not see a large number of students who question, "why are we getting such injustice?" If the schools succeed at the pace they are going, the outcome to expect is a great deal of community members who do not know how to question and help their community. Instead, you will have a bunch of outsiders that manipulate the community members in a way that resorts to enabling the community members and allows the outsiders to control and refine that community to their own needs. The youth perceive the schools in South Los Angeles as a waste of time. Most of the testimony we have gotten from students is that they hate the schools; that they are a dreadful place to go. Many consider it a waste of time because they are not being prepared for the real world. Instead, they all feel that they are being prepared to follow rules and take orders, which sounds a lot like the military. Coincidence? We think not.
“Why aren’t you learning anything?” I consider an interesting phrase from political piece of musical art. The name escaped my mind but the phrase left its mark on me. Fabian, a South Central student, stated that it is not that we aren’t learning, but we are forgetting what we learned in high school because the stuff is useless. How will what they teach us or help us in this community? The youth consider school like prisons, the gates are high and always chained, the students feel unheard and they feel like they are just numbers in the school system. They aren’t getting the knowledge the schools are supposed to give them, but are seeking it instead in the media. Schools in the South Los Angeles area play an underprivileged role in society. They have dehumanized the students. They consider them as numbers and recipients. The learners do not engage in deep conversations with the instructors about their assignments. The instructors feed the students information and expect them to choke it down and regurgitate it when they are asked to describe what they learned. They want the youth to know and be obedient, not to ask why. The structure of the learning process is designed to get youth to remain in the working class rather than to advance on to management material. Robert believes that “People in South LA are being educated to the point where they go get a degree so that they become teachers. In South LA you’re never gonna have any qualified teachers that know the community they are coming from. By qualified, I don’t mean teachers that go over the standards with you and give you tips on how to study and take tests. I am talking about teachers who understand what is going to happen when they step out of the classroom, teachers who understand what the student is going through.” Robert says that one reason why the school system is failing is because the school is deprived of that connection, that relationship, with the students. Rather than feel aligned with the teachers, the students feel that they are alone in the classroom. They feel they cannot ask for help because they think the teachers would bring them down by making them feel lower. School activities reinforce social inequality while pretending to do the opposite. In Macleod, J’s article of “Social Reproduction in Theoretical Perspective,” Samuel Bowles and Herbert Glintis suggest that “the major aspects of the structure of schooling can be understood in terms of the systemic needs for producing reserve armies of skilled labor, legitimating the technocratic-meritocratic perspective, reinforcing the fragmentation of groups of workers into stratified status groups, and accustoming youth to the social relationships of dominance and subordinancy in the economic system. Schools serving working-class neighborhoods are more regimented to emphasize rules and behavior control. In contrast, suburban schools offer more open classrooms that favor greater student participation, less direct supervision, more student electives, and, in general, a value system stressing internalized standards of control. Children of workers attend schools and are placed into educational tracks, both of which emphasize conformity and docility and prepare them for low-status jobs. By contrast, the sons and daughters of the elite are invited to study at their own pace under loose supervision, to make independent decisions, and to internalize social norms--all of which prepares them to boss rather than be bossed. In short, Bowles and Glintis argue that schools socialize students to occupy roughly the same position in the class structure as their parents. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Glintis state that the school systems vary depending on rates of income of the community. Principles of democracy standard 12.1 states that “Students explain the fundamental principles and moral values of American Democracy as expressed in the United States Constitution and other essential documents of American democracy.” This is stated in the California State Board of Education’s curriculum. The system has the students explain and describe documents of American democracy, which is simply another way of feeding them information mechanically. Another sections that students need to “Analyze the influences of ancient Greek, Roman, English, and LEADING European political thinkers such as John Locke, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, Niccolo Machiavelli, and William Blackstone on development of American government.” Not only does the standard tell you to not question it, but it also tells you to choke down information from a Eurocentric perspective. Is it a mystery why schools populated by students of predominantly of black and brown decent do so poorly with the Eurocentric material they are assigned which was primarily intended for European individuals? If the system does not have that sense of reading other people’s world like Freire stated in First Letter, then the system will not be able to acquire that connection with the youth of South Los Angeles, and the youth will not be able to function well in those schools. If this systemic dilemma continues to go on, it will promote social reproduction. Not only is social reproduction promoted by the system, but history will repeat itself, and all the systemic habits will restart within the next generation and the generation after them. We have concluded some interesting details from the qualitative information we have conducted and collected at the South Central community. According to South Los Angeles youth’s input toward the surveys, the qualitative data demonstrates that they believe the key points of acting politically are voting and reading. In contrast to what they believe political action means, the youth of the South Los Angeles Community do not believe that writing and talking about social issues is an important political activity. To read is to consume data, but to write is to take action and express your views on issues. The outcome of the school’s curriculum in South Los Angeles and the relationship it has with the qualitative evidence we acquired, suggests that all the people need to do in their community is vote. They feel that civic engagement only involves reading and voting at the level of the personally responsible citizen. Retaining that mentality, the people will not consider action as valuable as it really is. Questioning, like I have stated earlier, is not taught to the youth of South Los Angeles. It is related to critical analysis, which is linked with action. Although members of the community are aware of what is going on when it comes to voting, they think in terms of the personally responsible ideology and feel that reading and voting is more essential than actions. The members invest themselves in schools to advance their learning and reading skills. If this ideology continues to prevail, it will continue to contribute to social reproduction. They believe in the “American dream,” that the system lays out for them. That if you do objectives A, B, and C, then you are guaranteed to move on to X, Y, and Z. They perpetuate the American Dream and maintain the idea that reading from schools is the answer, which contributes to social reproduction by schools misadjusting their education and isolating members of the society with the “I” mentality and before you know it, you see the next generation deal with the same situations people of South Los Angeles are dealing with today. On a systemic level, many people will benefit from the system and plenty of others will not. The system was primarily designed to make European Americans successful and benefit from it. Those who buy into Eurocentrism and capitalism as well as buying into the government, benefit from the system. The system is trying to steer people away from their ethnic roots and Americanize them with the Eurocentric narrative. Those who do not benefit are individuals of color and non-believers of the system. They give people of color the lesson of mental slavery, that whatever they say is right and whatever people of color believe is wrong. In order for change to occur in our broken communities, we must break off the mental shackles that have imprisoned our minds and look at who we really are and not at how we are told to see ourselves by people who don’t understand what we, as members of South Los Angeles, go through. Look at the power you have and not the power you are told you think you have by others who try to bring you down. Just like a certain misunderstood member of the system stated when we spoke to them, “If we can get together and establish something, it can happen.” Recommendations As a result of our research, the group has come up with the following recommendations for what a critical civics curriculum should look like in schools. We conducted research in the following areas because we wanted to answer the following questions in the community of South LA: How youth are being taught to become civically involved? And how are they are already involved? Based on the research that has been done over the past weeks and testimony that was given by the community of South LA, we recommend the following. For Schools: 1. Schools must bring real talk to all classes – make material relevant by creating a space where counter-hegemonic dialogue helps students make critical sense of their rapacity. This will help by engaging the kids who wouldn’t normally be involved in class discussions. Also it’s a space for students to critically discuss what they think can’t be changed or is normal for what they should be learning in schools. This teaches students to communicate critically in order to arouse consciousness, organize like-minded youth, and mobilize w/ other organizations for a common purpose. 2. Recognize, recruit, support, and train critically aligned people who youth genuinely respect to teach in communities that they’re from, if not wholeheartedly committed to. This will help because the people who teach the classes will be a part of the communities. And if youth in the community respect the people up there with a committed and understanding heart, the students will want to come to class and the teachers will understand the students. 3. Offer a multi-ideological social studies curriculum focused on social change, moving from knowledge and love of self towards solidarity and genuine democracy. We believe that this will help the students by teaching them how to develop critical civic literacy. If students tthink about solidarity and genuine democracy they’d be justice oriented citizens. If the students think of different ways of creating social change, then they might want to use some of those changes to improve some of the inequalities today. 4. Teach its students to communicate critically in order to arouse consciousness, organize like-minded youth, and mobilize with other organizations for a common purpose. To empower students world-wide. If all students were taught to communicate critically then they could change minds. If students feel more comfortable expressing themselves then that might be a problem for not only administrators but also for the school system because these students are going to have questions and they are going to demand answers. 5. Re-define notions of success relative to the civic needs of students’ communities (Duncan-Andrade, 2003). It is important to redefine notions of success to the students of these communities because everyone is running. They’re running from where they grew up because they think to become successful is to make it out the hood. It means to shop in the richest neighborhoods, live where the rich live, and eat where they eat. So in these schools they teach you to do well in school so you can make it out. I think if schools were to teach its students to try and fix things in the community instead of running away from the community, the problems of black and brown role models wouldn’t continue to perpetuate. Conclusion: While doing our research we learned that the curriculum is disconnected from the students. At best, traditional curriculums creates citizens that are personally responsible citizens, people who are working for the satisfaction of themselves. If schools just teach students how to become civically involved and not to questions social issues as reflected by the “Don’t worry about what the person next to you is doing, only about you” mentality, then the school system is guilty of perpetuating the system capitalism. Students should know how to participate in civic life, they should know young people who have already been involved. Schools are responsible for telling the stories that don’t get told. I spent 5 years in elementary school learning how Christopher Columbus discovered America but not one whole year learning about my history and who I am. Students are taught to identify and be a part of American culture before they are taught about who their grandma and grandpa were. They get us to buy into the system and keep us there so that the education system gives us no knowledge of self. Then it becomes easy to make us non-critical citizens because we accept what ever the system gives us because we don’t think to question it. If the curriculum is disconnected from the students, they won’t be able to identify with the word and will think that the material is useless, and who wants to learn material that can’t be used in life. So these students begin to see schools as this useless toll that is not a benefit to them. Then how will you as the reader see yourself in the text? There are many ways that youth can study youth civic participation in schools. They can be oriented toward knowledge (epistemology), a theory of knowledge to show how we know and act politically by asking questions, getting involved with the community and seeing how we can make sure that there’s equality.Other ways are getting involved with the school system and seeing what type of citizens it is producing, protesting, marching, writing letters, speaking, educating the community, going to community events, observing the community, and asking community members what would they like to see. To do this, I need the ability to be a good researcher, a justice oriented citizen, and educated about the community. I need to not judge but seek to understand, evaluate the evaluation (true intellectual), and avoid binary’s (What’s good / bad). Public schools are grossly inefficient, and are not educating many of America's youths adequately. Schools that are run independent from local government bureaucracy provide better education at lower cost. School choice would allow more students to attend better schools. School choice is a potent educational reform that is far more effective than increased spending. The fears of opponents of school choice are factually unfounded. School choice is necessary to improve American education. Through allowing more parental choice in education, school choice forces education into a free market environment. As it is now, parents send children to the nearest schoolassigned to them by the school district. If a family is wealthy enough and chooses to do so, parents can send children to private schools. However, this family then pays twice for one education. They still pay their taxes, and they pay the tuition for the private school. Under a school choice plan, any parent who decides to send their child to a private school will receive a scholarship from the government, redeemable for tuition at scholarship accepting private schools. The scholarship dollar amount is far below that of the average cost per student per year at public schools, but would allow millions of parents who cannot presently afford private tuition to do so. It is important for youth to be thought to have critical civics literacies, I think it makes a big difference who does it because most youth are not afraid to be themselves in front of other youth. It tells us that they don’t teach or let students get involved in critical civic literacy’s. A possible reason for that might be that the school system is designed for certain people to fail, so if they help us develop critical civic literacy’s then we would start to question not only the inequalities in the school system but the inequalities in the world. So by my own understanding of critical civic literacy’s I can question anything I feel as unjust, and that means the government. If the masses were thought to ask questions and demand answers then we would have a chance to go after our dreams instead of thinking that dreams are impossible things to get ahold of. And when I say dream, I don’t mean that watered down “American Dream” that people of color are always talking about. It’s of people of color as presidents and governors, leaders who no longer have capitalism as a guide. When that happens I think that the United States will be at a true democracy. The most important time to learn how to do that is in schools. We believe that it should be a part of the curriculum in many ways. Young people can study youth civic participation in many ways, by first learning how to combine the world with the word, by learning how to deconstruct a high school curriculum And by questioning the inequalities in America. By seeing how issues affect them on a local level and a systemic level, and also by seeing where they are politically allied. Some tools that youth need are adults who are willing to listen to what the youth have to say about some of their conditions. |
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