To Go or Not to Go: Rural African American Students' Perspectives About Their Education

When I was growing up, there was never a thought in my mind about whether or not I would go to school. It was a given that I was going to go to school every day as long as my parents were alive and the Lord woke me up in good health. There was no room for negotiation about my being there. For my family, getting some kind of education is not something one does in order to climb social ladders or get a job that pays a high salary; rather, it is viewed as what one must do to be prepared for life and for harmonious existence with other human beings. By the time I was in high school, I went to school not so much with the idea of memorizing or accepting the bulk of information that was presented to me day after day, but to learn to play by the rules and the accepted norms of my society. My family is African American and middle-class with a mommy, a daddy, and two kids, a home that we owned, two cars, electric lights, heat, plenty of food-you know, a Happy Days family, only Black. As I was growing up, I thought everybody else had these things simply because they needed them. Needless to say, neither my family nor the schools I attended during my youth did anything to broaden my limited view of the world. This is probably the case for most middle-class youth, White or Black. Nothing about the educational process is challenged because children from middle-class, two-parent homes have been conditioned to fit into the educational system so nicely that they usually transit the system kink-free. Lynch (1979) points out in his research that, contrary to studies which assert that biological reproduction is the family's primary function, the family's reproduction tasks extend into the area of preserving culture and social cohesion as well. Thus, the family serves as a means to an end for the schools by facilitating the maintenance of the educational status quo. For poor kids, especially African American ones who may not have lived the Happy Days life, the differences between the rules and expectations of the school and the home miles apart. According to Fine (1991), poor adolescents are faced with a set of social circumstances