TOPIC 11.

CLASS ACTIVITIES THROUGH PROVOKING

“Education reproduces the inequalities already existing in reality ... The school can
never act as an engine of social change, promoting greater equality and social
justice” Bowles
In favour:
The school is known to be an agent of social change, but reality is that school is a place
where students go to learn new things, but it´s not true at all.
School depends of the socials aspects, so families with higher economic status can
provide their children a quality education because using their resources, families can
stimulate their pupils with extracurricular activities or giving them more opportunities
to learn and improve. But families with less resources can’t give as much opportunities
as other families. They focused on covering their basics needs, so the education plays a
secondary role in their daily life. They don´t provide enough importance to their
children´s formation so in the future they won´t be capable to get a job which let them
to increase in the social and economic scale.
Also, schools want to provide an equal education, but reality says that according to the
different backgrounds where the children come from, there is a mentality related to the
work and the education very different. For example, if a doctor has a son who works on
a factory, he thinks that his son could get a better job, but if a young worker gets a job
on a factory as his father or mother, he has reach at least what people expect about him.
So, in conclusion we think that the real educator is the neighbourhood where students
liven and not the school, because there, we can find inequality and social injustice.
Against:
From our point of view, the primary function of the school is educational, since every
human being must possess positive values recognized socially. This function is linked to
forming individuals who know how to live in society (socialization) by acquiring
certain rules and a specific role. The school must prepare individuals for tomorrow and
what to do daily.
The public educative system guarantees the same opportunities to all children without
taking into account the cultural, economic or ethnical background which they proceed
from. At the same time, the public system of grants allows students with fewer
available resources to have same opportunities as other children, rewarding students
who dedicate more effort and dedication.
Increasingly, Education in diversity is presented as an instrument for school integration,
constituting itself as a conceptual engine that allows us to respond to social difficulties
and inequalities due to its culture, social and economic context.
We can work with “learning communities” which is a project of social and cultural
transformation of the educational centre. In this communities, we work with
interculturality, letting students, parents and families participating in an active way,
palliating differences by means of interactive groups (problem-solving mechanisms,
cooperative learning processes, practical rules for the management of tasks), family
training and educational inclusive.
They try to overcome inequalities fighting for educational equality to combat processes
of social exclusion in order to provide them a quality education. In addition, we can talk
about cooperative classrooms (collective construction of knowledge) and teacher-
student-family.

Eva Álvarez Lorente

Antonio Morcillo Martínez
Javier Ruiz Izquierdo
José Francisco Campos Martínez
2º B