Devon Bautista – Civil Rights, Multicultural Education, Bilingual Education

The first thing the chapter spoke about was the 1960 UN convention in which discrimination in education was banned. The conditions that constituted discrimination were “race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, [and] economic condition or birth.” This list is so long and extensive that it is laughable. During the time sixties conditions were much more obviously segregated based on these mentioned conditions, and today’s schools are arguably just as bad due to the ways in which children are divided into different schools. The rest of the chapter also focused on the effect and struggles of integration and search for equal opportunity in American education.  One thing I asked myself immediately was, were bilingual schools effective? Though I know they allow preservation of culture, they also lead to more segregation and therefore more educational stratification… The other thing that popped out to me in this chapter was the section involving the coloring of textbooks. I think it directly applies to what we discussed in class regarding America portraying a superhero like image that always does no harm and wins. The US has always done this, and it is interesting to see the effect of how textbook portrayals of different people has defined people’s beliefs. I was more so surprised about the portrayal of women than racial or ethnic portrayals. The lose weight by smoking was probably the most ridiculous portrayal of women in the chapter. A question I had about this was, do you think that media images and textbook portrayals shape peoples beliefs about other Americans? Do you think the portrayals of people in different countries that we see in documentaries, or the news, make us believe we know their situations in the same way we relate to one another in America? Does this define the way we interact with locals or foreigners?