Education in the 1960s Essay
Education is one of the most important aspects in people’s lives and its benefits are unlimited, it is acquiring even more importance than it’s been in past few decades. In today’s society education is essential in order to be successful economically and socially. In addition education is an essential right for all humans, it also has the power to shift the status of economically challenged people and make them rise above that by following its path. Even though it is an essential right for all humans there was and still is discrimination in its field.This essay will discuss how discrimination in education and employment has caused a major setback on the life of minorities. There are two major dilemmas that appear throughout the 1960s and our current time. The first major problem is that education system is always rapidly growing in all its levels, which leads to increasingly crowded classes that can’t uphold the required material and faculty to that huge number of students, “in the 1960s public school enrollment was 1.
million students in excess of classroom capacity, a situation that persisted throughout the decade. ” This particular problem leads educational institutes to either cut back on their materials or substitute their staff members with lower quality staff to continue operating. Some educational institutes tend to limit the number of students who attend their classes by discriminating against them.We saw that in the 1960s when the segregation was still in motion, even though segregation was a norm in the lives of people in the 1960s, the education system was supposed to be distributed equally among all different ethnicities; however, it is a well-known fact that African American and other minorities were treated as second class citizens and that resulted in them receiving a lower standard of education than whites.Even after the outlawing the segregation of education in 1954 by the Supreme Court a lot of states kept on with their same methods of segregated education, and since the desegregation law didn’t stop we see that minorities were held back due to it, and since they didn’t have the criteria to enter higher education institutes they also lacked in the occupational race, “The first is whether higher levels of education will enable Negroes to secure better jobs, and the answer is obviously yes. ”(Milner, 280).Also studies show that up to 65% of minorities with at least 4 years of higher education where holding jobs as professionals (Milner, 281), also the same thing accrued to lower educated minorities, ” The pattern was similar for other levels of education and occupational status. For example, thirty-two percent of nonwhite men with one to three years of college had cler-ical or sales jobs while the figure was seventeen percent for high school graduates and seven percent for high school drop-outs.
Even though racial segregation has been outlawed, a new kind of educational inequality has grown in our days. This is the inequality between social classes, which means that schools in lower income communities have poorer educational conditions than higher income ones. Schools in economically disadvantaged regions get around half as much resources per student than schools in prosperous regions, and its commonly known that economically deprived areas are more often populated by minorities.Another major issue that accrued during the 1960s, was the difference between the professional occupational achievement of whites to non-whites.
(Milner, 281). The Siegel studies which analogized data regarding the relationship between color, age, education, and occupation using 1950 and 1960 census data had a exceptional finding, that the higher the education level of the subject was the more segregated the occupation was in the matter of race, except for the four or more years college graduates. Milner, 282) Also this matter was subjected two questions, whether there was a racial segregation behind that or if the quality of education of the non-whites minorities was a lower slandered which caused them to have lower occupational status then there whites peers. The fact that minorities have had a lower quality of education might not be true but the fact they were held back by racial segregation is true ”This is not to say that Negroes with higher levels of education were worse off than those with less education, only that they were farther behind whites with com-parable education.
. (Milner, 288) Discrimination between whites and other minorities have dropped severely low from the past few decades” although many employers still discriminate against blacks, women, and members of other groups, the changes that have taken place in the past forty to fifty years have been substantial indeed”( Burstein,ix).In conclusion, minorities were held back in education and occupation due to discrimination in both fields, and that lead to them facing difficulties in the occupational race. However there has been a huge change for the good in the discrimination of education and occupation, even though some new problems my spore for time to time, official are dealing with them in a proper manner but it will take time to get past all of these difficulties.
