Education can be listed among the key factors that impact people’s quality of life and are equally important to various social and ethnic groups. With the emergence of new methods of teaching that help people to acquire necessary skills, competition in the global job market tends to increase. Thus, without proper education, even a gifted person faces the risks of not meeting competition and being unable to make the most of his or her talents. Recognizing education as a human right, it is pivotal to focus on the problem of racial integration in educational institutions. This essay argues that ethnically mixed schools can be helpful in reducing unequal access to the right to education, thus strengthening relationships between dissimilar ethnic groups.
Even though the status of education as one of the basic rights is widely recognized, young people’s opportunities to gain high-quality knowledge often depend on their race and their families’ socio-economic position. In her essay titled “The next kind of integration,” Bazelon (2013) discusses the success of desegregation strategy used in Louisville and based on making every school “between 15 and 50 percent African-American” (p. 211).
The equal distribution of non-white and white students in Kentucky and similar strategies implemented in other states have a variety of benefits at the confluence of cross-cultural communication and helpful social links. As for specific examples, when children from dissimilar racial groups become friends, financially disadvantaged students manage to build connections with wealthier people, which can impact their future career opportunities.
The creation of ethnically mixed schools supports the minorities’ right for education and can make dissimilar groups more united, positively impacting social cohesion. Apart from better career opportunities for minority students that rise from cross-cultural friendships, ethnically mixed education can help the representatives of racial majorities to cope with race-based prejudice. In particular, racial segregation in education reduces people’s opportunity to communicate with culturally diverse populations.
Despite the mixed views on Louisville’s desegregation strategy, there is evidence proving that the lack of efforts maintaining racial diversity levels and reducing education privilege results in the growth of “the race gap in school outcomes” (Bazelon, 2013; Mickelson, 2015, p. 657). As a result, the links between students belonging to the ethnic majority and different minority groups become weaker. It has negative consequences for both groups and contributes to the growth of social tensions. For instance, white students in schools that are predominantly white can make conclusions about other racial groups mistaking some people’s personality traits for characteristics peculiar to the group in general.
Ethnically diverse schools are an important measure helping to meet the needs of different racial groups and solve issues with the current balance of power.
In the essay titled “Two cheers for Brown v. Board of Education,” Carson (2013) discusses the legislative history of educational segregation related to race-based differences. In particular, the researcher argues that the most famous decision of the U. S. Supreme Court concerning racial segregation in education encouraged ethnic minorities to believe that “the structure of white supremacy was illegitimate and legally vulnerable” (Carson, 2013, p. 219). Potentially, the decision to prevent schools from violating the right of the non-white population to have access to education contributed to the present situation with white Americans’ perceptions of other racial groups. It is drastically different from what could be observed in the 1950s when any ideas concerning equality in education could “release the tidal wave of racial hysteria” (Carson, 2013, p. 220). Nowadays, the degree of prejudice on the basis of race is lower than it used to be, which can be a result of activists’ concerted efforts aimed at the popularization of diversity.
When the principle of diversity in education is widely supported, it is possible to protect the rights of minority students and increase their chances to successfully enter white-dominated workplaces. According to the research article by Gamoran, Collares, and Barfels (2016), “school racial composition predicts workplace racial composition,” which has implications to diversity in the American labor market.
In particular, minority students who attend high schools with diverse racial compositions are likely to have more white co-workers in the future compared to the representatives of minority groups in black-dominated educational institutions (Gamoran et al., 2016). By mixing students with dissimilar racial backgrounds, it is possible to improve the minorities’ access to education and make them more aware of white students’ approaches to learning and work. As a result of this constant interracial communication, minority students can become capable of sustaining competition in jobs that are currently segregated.
References
Bazelon, E. (2013). The next kind of integration. In G. H. Muller (Ed.), The McGraw-Hill reader: Issues across the disciplines (12th ed.) (pp. 201-211). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Carson, C. (2013). Two cheers for Brown v. Board of Education. In G. H. Muller (Ed.), The McGraw-Hill reader: Issues across the disciplines (12th ed.) (pp. 219-225). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Gamoran, A., Collares, A. C., & Barfels, S. (2016). Does racial isolation in school lead to long-term disadvantages? Labor market consequences of high school racial composition. American Journal of Sociology, 121(4), 1116-1167.
Mickelson, R. A. (2015). The cumulative disadvantages of first- and second-generation segregation for middle school achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 52(4), 657-692.