Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. and South African Schools
Prudence L. Carter
Abstract
This book details a sociological, comparative analysis of the institutional and group dynamics in eight schools located within four cities in the United States and South Africa. This book details how even as discussions and approaches to educational equality differ significantly in two nations rebounding from centuries of overt practices of racial and social inequality, many everyday school exchanges and practices parallel one another. Educators in the United States and South Africa are faced with the continual challenges of how to make schools work better for all students and of how to incor ... More
This book details a sociological, comparative analysis of the institutional and group dynamics in eight schools located within four cities in the United States and South Africa. This book details how even as discussions and approaches to educational equality differ significantly in two nations rebounding from centuries of overt practices of racial and social inequality, many everyday school exchanges and practices parallel one another. Educators in the United States and South Africa are faced with the continual challenges of how to make schools work better for all students and of how to incorporate diverse groups of students better within these schools. This book argues chiefly that schools in these two societies, weakened historically by racial and ethnic discrimination, will greatly miss the benefits of a critical social policy for reducing inequality via education if they do not pay sufficient attention to the school's socio-cultural context. This book sheds insight into how to enable school-communities to better incorporate previously disadvantaged groups and to engender equity by promoting “cultural flexibility.” It also raises important and timely questions about the social, political, and philosophical purposes of schooling that have been greatly ignored by many and cautions against myopic approaches to education that merely focus on test-scores and attainment outcomes.
Keywords:
comparative research,
cultural flexibility,
educational equality,
ethnicity,
race,
schools,
social inequality,
socio-cultural context,
United States,
South Africa
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199899630 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199899630.001.0001 |
