Individualistic rhetoric of success & achievement
Thirty-two urban education students from Swarthmore College recently watched the introductory First Person DVD on their first day of class. Over the next several weeks, excerpts from their responses will be posted as part of this blog.
I would be lying if I said that I have never seen students like the ones in this documentary. Personally, I see students equally as motivated every day; students caught in the nets of a broken system. Nonetheless, I do think that portraits like the six young adults in the film are important to be shared. Having more representations of students who are driven to succeed is both helpful to rectify the misconceptions that the general “non-urban� public may have about “urban students� and also to serve as mirror images for students stuck in similar predicaments in their educational experiences.
However, at the same time that I think that the tendency to portray urban high schools as a place where “only the strong survive� firstly does not address the root of the problems (funding, class size, qualified teachers…), and secondly the individualistic rhetoric of success and achievement , I believe, is not the most effective for the successes of entire communities.
