Asian American Education

I am a product of the American education system. I have been placed into this very institution ever since I could hold up a pencil and say my own name. Education is highly valued in my traditional Asian household because knowledge is seen as power. Knowledge, as an attribute, is related to achieving the American Dream. Making it up the ladder of success is the classic rags to riches mentality that is deeply embedded into the heads of many minority families. My immigrant parents, who have never attended college, sacrificed plenty to come to America so that I would be able to receive an education and the unthinkable opportunities that they could not have. While America is considered the land of hopes and dreams, it is also anything but. The idea

It is a concept created by a sociologist named C. Wright Mills. Being in the clockworks of the education system as an Asian American, I am a mere observer. I have attended public school all my life, and I grew up learning that education was the key to success. However, throughout history, many great inventors and entrepreneurs of our time such as Mark Zuckerberg or Elizabeth Holmes didn’t finish college. They were able to receive an education without being confined to the typical education system, which highlights the point being that maybe the problem that hinders student success and holding them from their true potential is the education system

Throughout my years, there was only one Black student named Sam attending the institution. He didn’t graduate with the class because he had disappeared by the third grade. The next time I saw Sam around was a few years later, sitting on the red steps behind my elementary school with some neighborhood “thugs” that sat around smoking and cutting school all the time. The circumstances in which he was placed were all positive and worked in his favor, but the choice for him to make the best out of it was all up to whether he wanted to be that one in a million or to become a statistic. The teachers encouraged critical thinking and thinking abstractedly so you could formulate your own solutions rather than follow the orthodox method. Next, I attended an inner city Junior High School. I was not zoned there; I was accepted through their gifted program, but this only comprised a small fraction of the school. Coming from a school in a good neighborhood to one that was subpar was a huge leap, I immediately noticed the vast differences in the quality of education. My junior high school was mostly composed of Blacks, Hispanics, and a small percentage of White. In Segregation Prominent in Schools, Study Finds, by Motoko Rich, the statistics show that “43 percent of Latinos and 38 percent of blacks attend schools where fewer than 10 percent of their classmates are white (Motoko, 2012).” I was placed into the