Education
...ere is a better world outside of the world you have been living in. Mike Rose states this over and over again by repeating himself in saying how bad the conditions were around him. Like he says in his preface about his book and his story, “It is a book about the abilities hidden by class and cultural barriers. And it is a book about movement: about what happens as people who have failed begin to participate in the educational system that has seemed so harsh and distant to them” (Rose 48). This statement refers to how if you are in a lower class the expectations are a lot lower and therefore if you end up succeeding it is a bigger surprise to everyone. It seems to me like Mike Rose is trying to say that life, particularly education is a test and evaluation. Every move you make is graded and evaluated by a group of individuals that then tell you if it is good enough by their standards. “We are a nation obsessed with evaluating our children, with calibrating their exact distance from some ideal benchmark. In the name of excellence, we test and measure them as individuals, as a group, and we rejoice or despair over the results” (Rose 48). With only a few exceptions, there are so many occupations that you can only get with a degree or a higher education. It is how kids do on tests and papers that make the rest of their life. Why is it that our lives are shaped by how good of grades we get on tests? Especially when all that is on the test is usually forgotten next year because it doesn’t have to do with our lives anymore. It is not until college where an actual specific study is put on the youth of today and even then they are forced to learn things that do not matter to the profession they choose later in life and this is why Mike Rose poses the statement, “I just wanna be average.” Even with all the unfortunate problems of the mental world surrounding Rose, it was within the educational system itself that is what really put an obstacle on Rose. Rose was a part of the vocational educational system which as he puts it, “has aimed at increasing the economic opportunities of students who do not do well in our schools” (Rose 58). All this is saying is that Rose was at the lower end of the school spectrum meaning he was slower that average kids at learning. This was all because of his social status and because he had taken a placement test that got mixed up with another Rose, showing that he was going to have trouble in school. No matter if he was supposed to be in it or not, being in it did nothing but hurt his already unmotivated feelings towards education. While in vocational education, Rose had started a bad habit. He would try hard only in the classes that he found interesting. This would later result in a terrible thing when he crossed over into the college prep program. When he first learned of the move he was going to make from vocational to college prep, he decided to read about it and see how kids like himself did from a move like that. This is what he said of his findings, “according to all I’ve read since, such a shift as one report put it, is virtually impossible. Kids at that level rarely cross tracks” (Rose 60). This was just another way to make it more of a reality to him that he would fail at it and he would just become his parents working night jobs and bringing home very little money. Rose went into his new “world” as he called it with unsure outlooks and not really knowing what would come if it. The way he was finally put into college prep, which is where he should have been anyways, is one that involves a lot of luck and support from a specific teacher. It was really hard for Rose on his own but he did get some help along the way. Although his parents never were there to help motivate him and help with homework, they were the ones that saved money to help get Rose into Our Lady Mercy. This was a private catholic school which was known as the higher lever of education compared to a regular public school. This is ultimately how he got recognized, some say if it wasn’t for Mr. McFarland he woul...