"Meanwhile, back at school, I feared my grades would suffer horribly because I couldn't concentrate. Every moment of every day was filled with awful surprises that began early each morning. I hoped and prayed I wouldn't get ejected before the end of school. I took heart because I could see signs of the kind of student activities that only come near the end of the school year"(Pattillo Beals 270).

Throughout the course of our country's tarnished history, prejudice and racism have played an enormous role in the quality of education attained by our children. Until the Supreme Court's ruling in the Brown vs. the Board of Education case in 1954, which stated that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, minorities, specifically blacks, and whites did not attend the same schools in the south. Rather, the Jim Crow reality existed in which "separate but equal" was the mindset held by the majority of the population. However, with the onset of the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, the educational atmosphere in our schools has changed somewhat. No longer is it simply racist whites attacking blacks. No, today, the target of students' criticis

In summation, the racial tensions that were present before the movements began to improve people's economical and educational opportunities are still very much alive. However, they are not as apparent as they once were. No longer is simply black and white racism the problem so much as the tensions growing between lower and higher class students that are not given the same opportunities to succeed in their own education. The assimilatory tactics at work in our modern curriculum has created a class system in which the minorities are forced to view themselves as different and therefore inferior. In accordance with this notion, inferior people receive inferior resources with which to improve themselves. Which is worse, a young white child who cannot read or a minority child who has no motivation to read because he knows that even if he can, he will systematically be pushed down due to his race or economic status? In order to provide equal opportunity for all people, we must !

As is the case with most other things in life, however, the educational system is not run ideally as is shown in Dwight Okita's poem "In Response to Executive Order 9066." "I saw Denise today in Geography class. She was sitting on the other side of the room. 'You're trying to start a war,' she said, 'giving secrets away to the Enemy. Why can't you keep your big mouth shut?' I didn't know what to say. I gave her a packet of tomato seeds and asked her to plant them for me, told her when the first tomato ripened she'd miss me"(Schilb and Clifford 1019). All too often, judgements are made based simply on one's appearance rather than on the quality of their character.

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m and hatred has branched out. Homosexuals, whites, blacks, Asians, athletes.... and the list goes on. The reality of the situation is that despite the tireless efforts of those people that came before us, discri!

The truth is that the educational opportunities available to many minorities are not commensurate with those of wh

Some common words found in the essay are:
Emmitt Till, Eric Harris, Jim Crow, Value Meanwhile, Denise Geography, Central School, Asian American, Board Education, Rock Arkansas, Mathematics Science, little rock, lower class, civil rights, african americans, educational opportunities,
Approximate Word count = 1393
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)