In class on Friday I related a story about my great grandmother.
In Essen Germany, Oma (Marie) was unable to continue with her education past 8th grade. She stopped going to school despite being so good at math that her teacher suspected her of cheating on her exams. He ordered her to the front of the room to reveal her as a cheater by forcing her to try to answer questions on the spot. She proved him wrong by working out his toughest questions in her head, while standing in front of the class.
Although she had the right to attend school she experienced negative sanctions from her teacher, who believed that girls could not do well at math. This would be inequality of treatment as well violating her teacher's expectations about gender and math. She also experienced inequality of opportunity because her family needed her to work as a young teenager to make it through the hard economic times in Germany then.
Later, she moved to Pennsylvania to be with my great-grandfather who worked in a steel mill while Oma took care of the house and raised their daughter. Later, when my uncle (Oma's grandson) was graduating from high school, his parents did not have money to send him to college. Oma contacted him and told him that he needed to go for her, because she had never had the chance. Oma paid for school and my uncle went on to become a successful engineer.
In this example, my uncle did not experience inequality of rights, nor of treatment, but it was inequality of economic opportunity that was going to block his path. However, his grandmother intervened and made it possible for him attend college.
In this assignment you are asked to do three things:
- Learn about the academic biographies of people in your family, especially from the generations of your parents and grandparents. From those, identify examples where either:
- Someone who would have liked to have gone to college by was unable due to some source of inequality (rights, expectations, norms, treatment, opportunity) or
- Someone was able to go and that was significant for some reason (opportunity due to the GI bill, etc.)
- Describe your example(s) and make direct links to the dimensions of inequality that are relevant in your example(s).
- Explain how your are standing on the shoulders of giants. By attending college now, you are standing on the shoulders of giants. Parents, grandparents and others from earlier generations have made it possible for many of our generation to seek higher education when many in the past could not.
- How will you best take advantage of this opportunity, and thus achieve more because of their efforts?
Here is where you turn in your answers:
Here is the thread on OUSociology where you can discuss these issues. You can choose to share some aspects of your example, the tie-ins to dimensions of inequality, or you can simply make valuable comments about the experiences of others.
