As a student, I am given the opportunity to expand my knowledge every day, but that is not everyone’s reality.
President Barack Obama’s 2015 discretionary spending proposal allocates 55 percent of the $1.16 trillion to the military and 6 percent to education. The discretionary process can be changed annually depending on which programs Congress chooses to fund. Yet every year military functions dominate national spending. I believe the lack of outrage stems primarily from ignorance, not complacency.
People who live paycheck to paycheck do not have the luxury of researching inequalities—they are living through them. These same people, and countless others, send their children to school in hopes of providing them a better life, but the current education system in the U.S. treats students and youth as profitable commodities, not as the future leaders of this country.
This reality is especially true for public school students. As a public high school graduate from Tennessee, college and post-graduation options presented to me were limited. On the day of the ACT, my goal was to score a 21 out of 36 to receive the state scholarship worth $4,000 and begin a college education. Joining the military was presented as the next option to fund my education and escape poverty. My teacher asked each of us what we wished to score before the test. I confessed I wanted to score at least a 27. Although I hoped to attend Georgetown if I scored in the 30s range, I believed at the very least, a 27 would allow me to attend a school in D.C. He laughed in my face and told me that not even he scored that high. The experience was demeaning, but I felt inspired to surpass a 27, and I did.
My narrative may insinuate a problem with the individual, but the problem lies on the institutional level as well. We do not invest in our youth, we profit from them. We spend nearly 10 times more on our military than we do on education. Imagine a family living the American Dream. For every $100 dollars the father spends on building a larger and stronger fence around his home, he buys one of his children a pack of pencils and a few notebooks. To be prepared for school, his child needs a backpack. If the father truly represented the U.S. government, he would give his child a loan to go buy a backpack. By the time the child enters a less than ideal job, the interest on the loan would far surpass the price of the backpack and its immediate benefits. The other option would be to work for the father in the creation and maintenance of the fence. He would give you a backpack for no cost, but building the fence is dangerous. The child would have to defend the fence with his or her life.
Clearly, option two is too gruesome for a father to do to his children, but the government is more than willing to do so to its citizens.
Problems also lie in the zero-tolerance systems instituted in schools. Zero-tolerance systems treat children as criminals without addressing the economic and social roots of conflict. Restorative justice programs implemented in certain schools in Chicago and other high-risk areas have worked well over time, but need to further develop to become more effective. In order to improve the behavior of youths, we need to invest in them, but there is no profit in that approach. There is, however, a profit in prison systems.
The school-to-prison pipeline predominantly affects the Latino and black communities who are already victims of poverty and other signs of structural and cultural violence. The people profiting from juvenile prisons have reason to donate to state elections to ensure representatives are elected who will take private interests into account. One-third of incarcerated youth return to prison within a few years and are stigmatized for the remainder of their lives.
The education system in the U.S. is an institution of structural violence, which condemns generation after generation to lives as commodities instead of citizens. If we want our country to survive, the youth of our country should not have to fight for survival. Unless we alter American spending to focus more on education, the ruin of our country will come from the inside and our incredible fence will stand for nothing.
