Schools as 'youth ghettos'

A definition of "ghetto" is: "a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live because of social, legal, or economic pressure". School tends to be the focal point of all or most activities for adolescents in the U.S., thus qualifying schools as a form of ghetto in which youth live separately from the rest of society. This has both advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

1. School is a safe refuge from a world fraught with adult risks and dangers, conducive to social/interpersonal experimentation and learning.

2. In an integrated setting, students may experience a variety of cultural and ethnic influences, preparing them to participate in a pluralistic society.

3. School can facilitate individuation by affording adolescents a setting, apart from the nuclear family, in which to develop unique interests, skills and interpersonal relationships.

4. Schools provide a controlled environment in which students can choose to learn the skills necessary to meet the economic needs of society, and reap the financial rewards.

Disadvantages:

1. The compulsory nature of education is inimical to human education: "...education must be voluntary rather than compulsory, for no growth to freedom occurs except by intrinsic motivation. Unlike the present inflexible lockstep, our educational policy must allow for periodic quitting and easy return to the scholastic ladder, so that the young have time to find themselves, and to study when they are themselves ready. This is Eric Erickson's valuable notion of the need for moratoria, and the anthropological insistence of Stanley Diamond and others, that our society neglects the crises of growing up" (Goodman).

2. Concepts of dignity and privacy are notably deficient in most public school settings (Friedenberg).

3. The school's assumption of custodial control of students implies that power and authority
are indistinguishable, teaching students that power counts more than legitimacy. (Friedenberg)

4. By infantalizing adolescents, through the imposition of diffuse authority, schools do not allow much maturation to occur during the years when most maturation would naturally occur (Friedenberg).

5. In traditional educational settings, students develop and "us-versus-them" mentality as part of a pathological subculture in reaction against school authorities.

6. "I hold that the aim of life is to find happiness, which means to find interest. Education should be a preparation for life. Our culture has not been very successful. Our education, politics, and economics lead to war. Our medicines have not done away with disease. Our religion has not abolished usury and robbery. Our boasted humanitarianism still allows public opinion to approve of the barbaric sport of hunting. The advances of the age are advances in mechanism--in radio and television, in electronics, in jet planes. New world wars threaten, for the worlds's social conscience is still primitive" (Neill).

REFERENCES

Dewey, John (1963). Experience and Education. london: Collier-MacMillan.

Friedenberg, Edgard Z. (1965). "The modern high school: A profile" in Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms, Boston: Beacon Press.

Goodman, Paul (1962). Compulsory Mis-education. New York: Vintage.

Neill, A.S. (1969). "Summerhill education vs. standard education" in Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, New York: Hart Publishing Co.

Thomas S. Rue, M.A., NCC
June 16, 1991

The University of Iowa - College of Education
Psychological and Quantitative Foundations 31:163
The Adolescent and Young Adult

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