Please examine the blog: Understanding the Aspirations of Rural High School Students
This blog examples one of the instances of containment
culture that I have personally witnessed. The author, Jonathan Bartels, couples
himself with a researcher, Dr. Meece, to describe the underachievement of the
students attending rural high schools around the nation. After completing their
research, they concluded that rural students are not achieving at the level
which they should be. They propose this piece for anyone who is not a part of
or someone unfamiliar with the challenges of the rural life style. Although the
writing is not persuasive, it does inform the reader of a moving topic – the
containment of young rural students and their future. Informing the public is
their main purpose for publishing their work because if people are not informed
about the problems of our nation, they will most definitely never seek to solve
them.
This blog
strikes home to me; growing up and attending a rural high school that could
have easily been a facility for the author’s research. I see the containment of
students from the bright futures that they could possess constantly. The
problem is identifying who plays the role of “the container.” The blog fails to
offer any real explanations, simply offering informative statistics and leaving
out any in-depth reasoning. As a student and a rural citizen, I feel as if I
escaped the containment culture of rural living. However, I did and still do
feel the effects on my life. I feel like the cause of this containment culture
comes from the lack of aspirations in rural living. Actually, it is less of a
matter of aspirations but more of an issue of feeling too comfortable. I find
that kids growing up in the rural areas are often times too comfortable or
plain out unwilling to leave the easy life they live and seek out a bigger and
brighter future. Although it may seem as if I am playing towards the cliché of
big cities and big dreams, this is not my goal; actually it is the opposite of
my goal. I want more students growing up in areas much similar to rural
Bainbridge, Ohio where I have lived all my life to seek secondary degrees, seek
promising futures, and most importantly seek to improve upon the live they have
been living all their lives. Not to say that country living is bad; personally
I love it and miss it dearly. I just know from firsthand experience that
opportunities are limited in that environment. Of course most people analyzing
the situation would offer that the education systems in rural areas lend
student to be unable to handle a college course load or even getting accepted
into college altogether. This is simply not the case; I went to a subpar high
school and pay the price for it currently. I had little to no help or guidance while
applying to and getting into college; now that I am here I find courses to be
much more difficult than the average student and spend countless hours studying
to compensate for my poor basal-education. However, I know it is possible for
most rural students to come to a larger university and succeed; myself as an
example, I maintain an above average GPA at one of the nation’s best
universities in an effort to find a greater purpose in my life than living
around the rural neighborhood and working a simplistic and non-skills related
job. This requires me to live outside my comfort zone constantly – a thing more
rural students should do. Doing so is the only way to escape the containment
culture of rural living.
After reading this, are you reminded of any examples in your
own life where you have “escaped” containment culture? If so, explain how and
why you did.
Can you think of any other containment culture placed upon
the youth of America nowadays that suppresses and limits their futures?
Your point is that rural students are contained by the idea that country is more comfortable and they shouldn't reach for a secondary degree because that will only lead to a life less comfortable, right? I think a lot of lower-class African-American students feel contained by their class/race and therefore feel like they will never make it to college. On the other hand, white, suburban, upper-class kids may be contained by the idea that they have to go to college or will never make anything of themselves.
ReplyDeleteI think Nora makes a good point. Society can contain a people by their class and cause the people of that class to think they can't make it into college but it can also cause people of another class to think they have to go to college. I know several of my friends are only in college because "its the thing to do".
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