Prompt 4

When talking about education inequity, the issue that comes up is that education inequity leads to a lack of success for kids later in life.  The term means different things to different people but what can be agreed upon is that success means a stronger standing in life and a good education is an important foundation for any attempt at being successful.  Education in another way can be considered the starting point of a map leading to success.  However, education inequity causes this starting point to be skewed and blurred.  Students who would have normally had a good sense of what comes next in life to be successful have the added challenge of an unequal education system that does nothing but make that path to the future much harder to see.

As I discussed in my last post, the public school system in Hawaii has suffered for many years due to lack of funding, political pressure, and culture differences.  However, the Department of Education in Hawaii has made leaps and bounds since my residency there 10 years ago.  Aware that the students of local families were trapped in a cycle of education inequity, the department has since brought college credit courses to public schools and increased Advanced Placement subject material for students.  Since this has begun a decade ago, Hawaii has seen an increase in 8% in high school graduates who attended college the following year.

I look back on my public school education experience in Hawaii and I am amazed that the public school system has made such progress.  The map to success that I had begun to follow was already blurred for me when I was still in elementary school.  The system was so bad my parents were wondering how to transition me to private schools and how to pay for it and how to prepare me for the entrance exams.  As the schooling seemed to get worse, the situation became more stressful as we looked for ways for me to learn outside the public school system that would still keep me on the map to success.

If the education inequity in Hawaii hadn’t caused a rift between locals using the public school system and the private school system, the map to success for Hawaii locals wouldn’t be so difficult to follow and the percentage of “successful” adults in Hawaiian society would dramatically increase.  What is another obstacle to overcome is that in most families minds in Hawaii the map to success is an altogether different map from what it should be.  After generations of this education inequity and relative struggle to find success, most family’s idea of success is to just make it through high school and use family and local connections on the island to find stable jobs.  These jobs are stable, but they aren’t what most would call “successful”.  “Success” is a very subjective term but if it is being restricted by limitations such as those brought on by education inequity then the term is not fully being used.  The situation in Hawaii has been improved but the map to success is still far too blurred due to education inequity on the islands.

Educational Inequity Through Identity

Today people tend to identify themselves through institutions and communities.  When looking specifically at the education system, identity plays a major role in shaping a student’s expectations.  A larger school that receives more funding and tends to be located in more ideal and wealthy areas attracts students of the same traits.  A school that receives less money and is located in less ideal settings also attracts students with similar traits.  So the inequity begins before the student is even able to review classroom material.  By enrolling in a school that has limited resources and knowing that it doesn’t have the best reputation, the student is already at a disadvantage compared to students in more well funded schools.  They enrolled in the school because it’s what was available to them, therefore they identify with its quality, and therefore they expect their time there to have the same poor quality along with what the future will hold.  The same holds true for students enrolled in higher quality education institutions except that a positive identity is created and so the students live with an identity that tells them they are to be successful.  The identity that the institution has created, wether it be poor or high quality, has caused educational inequity.

Education and Race

An important issue concerning education inequity is one concerning race and ethnicity.  An example that I’m well acquainted with concerns the education system of Hawaii.  The public school system there legally is not segregated but what actually happens there is another story.  The population of Hawaii is very diverse and the mixing of culture between the local population and the caucasian one has caused friction in the education system.  The majority of the caucasian population moved to Hawaii with sufficient wealth to sustain themselves in an environment where the price of living is much much higher than on the mainland.  Therefore, these resources are used in the private school system where the instruction and material are much more advanced than what most of the local population uses which is the public school system.  This in turn creates a boundary between the two populations, it starts in education and leads to the future as education defines what livelihood these people will have.  The existing friction worsens as these two systems continue to separate the already tense populations.

Roots and Education

From our discussions in class over Electronic Monuments we have begun to cover the topic of root cause and in turn we have begun focusing more on the individual and not groups such as society.  An easy topic that can be seen as the cause of a lot of societal issues is educational inequity.  Looking at the United State’s education standpoint in the world, this country is lacking.  Our society has become focused on the fact that as one of the most influential countries in the world, we are no where near the top in terms of the level of education most of our citizens have.  This in turn can be seen as a root cause of other societal issues, such as poverty and crime.  We can see a correlation between the level of education in general the American public has and the level of crime and poverty seen.  On the individual level, an individual who has received less education becomes more prone to criminal and negative activities.  This distribution can be seen by narrowing in on individuals in communities where the educational level tends to be less than say a community where the education level is high and therefore crime rates are lower.  A culmination of these communities weakens the entire society.

 

Networked Activism

John Jones’s Article argues that networks are less effective than hierarchal power.  Malcolm Gladwell explains that the without centralized power and guidelines of authority networking fails to set clear goals and “reaching consensus” and therefore prove generally ineffective at campaigning.  I can see this to be true when compared to actual campaigns in person where risk is involved and that attracts people to invest more than a simple click on a website.  Networks are too prone to turn to clicktivism and attract people with too mild opinions of the cause to actually be effective in changing the real world.  Networks make communication within a campaigning group extremely easy and large in scope, but when networks are relied on to change the minds of strangers, they fall short.  Hierarchal power relies on risk and draws people to it on a personal level.  In the end strangers will feel more affected by an issue when presented it through hierarchal power.  An experience through something that involves real risk, power, and a sense of control will stick more than an experience through the safety that networks provide.  Identity, thoughts, and sacrifice are used minimally online and create a safer feeling environment, and safety makes us believe and feel affected by things a lot less than if we felt truly impacted by the issue.

NAMI Not That Helpful

A major organization that is actively seeking exposure and pursuing campaigns in aiding and spreading awareness of mental illness, both online and not, is the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  Their website provides a plethora of information concerning mental illness facts and opportunities to support the cause and organization.  Their website contains many different pages for facts, donations, locations, and support groups for victims.  This is a fantastic website for long term goals and is specially effective since it has the backing of a large organization that has multiple options for revenue and income.  However, since our project has to be short term and done without much financial support, this does little to help us formulate a plan for our project.  Since this organization’s goals are long-term, they focus more on discussion pages, donations, locations and events and not so much on grabbing the attention of as many people as they can in a short amount of time.  The website has no attention grabbers so people are more likely to not associate themselves with the issues presented and therefore care little about sacrificing more time to find out.  We on the other hand require a way to immediately grab the reader’s attention and make them care about the issues we’re presenting so that looking further into the material doesn’t seem like a sacrifice but more like a duty or obligation to themselves, and yet stay away from clicktivism.  NAMI provides little help for us in reaching our goal but it would be useful to keep in mind if we should ever want to expand on our project.

Networks and Algorithms

Being a computer science major, I deal with algorithms more than most.  We rely on these to predict behavior and outcomes of hardware and software alike.  Algorithms are the true step towards developing a more complexly connected and therefore smarter and powerful computer system.  The system of online social networking seems much closer to this than I believe most people think when specifically looking at human interaction.  Connectivity and the ways we connect to other people is a key characteristic of human life.  Ideas are generated and constantly being changed due to the instant access to our peer’s ideas due to tools such as the internet.  In creating mass media sharing platforms such as Facebook, we have in fact created a sort of algorithm for the sharing of ideas and the connection of human communities.  And what is a computer but a combination of complex and simple algorithms designed to connect different systems?  What these network platforms actually are doing is taking the complex characteristics of the human mind and developing these thoughts through a simpler system that is designed to connect to other humans and share data.  Of course this is still far from saying we have begun turning ourselves and society into hardware, but as we rely more on online social connections we see more and more similarities between us and the machines we use to network.

Experiential Nexus

In Trebor Scholz’s article, he comments on and explains the existence of the “experiential nexus”.  In Facebook, that relates to the space in which the users interact and share ideas.  What struck me as interesting is that Scholz describes this space as being subject to changes in intensity.  The way users interact with the space, such as through posting pictures or “liking” certain posts and the formation of groups, actually changes the way the space behaves and accepts new members.  A good example of this would be the separation of a music discussion group and a political discussion group.  These communities have formed in the experiential space of Facebook and now the addition of members depends on the members themselves.  Generally music discussion could be more laid back and more video clips are posted and the overall demeanor of the space is more relaxed compared to a group devoted to discussing politics.  The attitude of the group may seem more rigid and intense as this is more of a discussion rather than the sharing of personal taste in music.  This of course is a general example and should there be an actual music group and political group on Facebook their use of the experiential nexus may vary.  But they nonetheless effect it.  The point is that the experiential nexus is something that is always evolving as people have different virtual and non-virtual personalities and will be drawn to different “personalities” of the space and will in one way or another change it.