Kids of the Future | Teen Ink

Kids of the Future

January 11, 2010
By sagiegirl SILVER, Houston, Texas
sagiegirl SILVER, Houston, Texas
7 articles 3 photos 0 comments

How much do you value your education? Sadly,






some people may take it for granted, while other kids do





not even get the education they need. Their schools are






in very poor condition, because they do not have enough





books for the whole class to use. The status of the schools in East St. Louis are horrific, an elementary teacher tell us that she “has only one full-color workbook for her class. She photocopies workbook pages for her children, but the copies can’t be made in color” and sometimes the lessons need colors for the kids to understand (Kozol 7). With this disadvantage, the kids do not learn the same way as kids in different cities, richer cities. People do not see these as disadvantages, so they do not want to help them. They do not think that they deserve extra points because they are not working hard enough to get them. I agree with affirmative action, but they should help males instead of females and consider income, too.
Many minorities are poor because when they were younger they did not get an education. Since they did not get an education, they do not get a good paying job or sometimes they do not get a job at all. Why did they not get a good education? Well first off, they did not have money to pay for school or supplies. If they cannot afford a good school, they settle for what they can get and sometimes what they get is not good enough. Then when they have kids the same thing happens to them; it is like a messed up cycle of life. In addition, these kids have either no healthcare or bad healthcare. Either way it was not good for the kids, because what if they have a toothache. During class those kid with aches will sometimes be distracted from their schoolwork and that could end badly. Schools in some cities do not even have enough money to fix their school’s facilities.
Many minorities are being discriminated against just because of what color they are. Racism can be found between whites, Asians, blacks, or even Mexican. A school that was shut down in East St. Louis was named for Dr. King. The school was full of sewage and now has locked doors. Some people may say that it is ironic that all of the kids at this school were black because was it










not Martin Luther King who fought for diversity? One







girl in East St. Louis said, “It’s like a terrible joke on





history” and I agree with her because I see it as them






teasing Dr. King (Kozol 5). Why did he fight for diversity








if some people are still being segregated?
Why should we help the male gender? Well first off, as of two thousand and five males only take up forty-three percent of the nation’s college students and now the number of females in male-dominated jobs has increased greatly. For example, the number of female police detective has increased three hundred and sixty percent, civil engineers increased one hundred and ninety-six percent, mechanics increased one hundred and seventy-seven percent, and finally pilots increased one hundred and sixty-seven percent. Where do you think that leaves the guys? If you give the guys a little help maybe they can get a little farther and beat some of the girls out.
Some people may argue against me and say that if you are in a bad school you can work harder to get into a better school, but to work harder might include getting a tutor to help. If they are in a bad school already, sometimes it means that they do not have enough money to get into a better school. If they were in a better school then they would not need a tutor to help them, because maybe there would be more teachers to have a one-on-one lesson with the kid. Yes, you can teach yourself but how will you do that with out the proper books and supplies.
Wealthy people could say that you are discriminating against them, but you really are not. They may have the money to get the proper books and supplies; they could also get themselves a tutor. In addition, when you are poor you may have a low self-esteem because they see others with stuff that they maybe cannot have because it is not in their budget. They may also think that they are not good enough to go to college so they will just drop out during high school.
People may say that girls are more likely to drop out of high school and get pregnant so why not give them the extra bump to provide them some confidences. Well yes, but statistics say that since two thousand males are more prone to dropping out of school. Moreover, girls are already taking over the male-dominated jobs; so let the guys get back to their jobs and balance out the ratio of male and female workers.
There should still be affirmative action in this nation, but instead of helping the ladies, they should help the guys and they should also consider income. Why is this so important, well this give me a chance to voice my opinion on how they should chose people for college and even jobs. I think that this is very important for the education branch because education is like a key. With it, you can open up doors for yourself and the generations after. Do you see our nation moving forward without an education? All I have to say is the kids of today will be our future

The author's comments:
My thoughts about my paper:
My affirmative action was weaker than my previous paper but all the comments went straight to my piggy bank. I think that my strength in this paper was my grammar and my weakness was everything else. My voice that is usually strong was weaker here, I don’t know why. I had a lot of thought on this paper but I guess I just didn’t put it in my paper.

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