Analysis Of The Land Of Opportunity By Loewen

In the “The Land of Opportunity” by James W. Loewen in Chapter 8 in the textbook ‘From inquiry to Academic Writing’ it talks about how many American students and the American children base themselves off of others. In the first paragraph in “The Land of Opportunity” claims that many middle class student know little to none about how the American class structure works nor about how it has changed over time. They soon jump to the hypothesis that most high school students come out of high school ignorant of the workings of the class structure. Professor Loewen asked one of his classes of first year college students, “Why is your family well off?” Most of them replied with the assumption that poor people should be shamed upon for being poor due …show more content…
They base their opinions off of personal experience and how America is looked at from an outer resource. The two articles I will compare and conclude are one written by ‘The New York times’ and another one written by ‘The Washington Post’. Both are based off of the same idea as well as the Article I am performing this synthesis on. The idea is based off of the land of opportunity, in the article “The Land of Opportunity” by James Loewen talks about how high school student do not leave high school prepared for life. They soon claim that ‘High school history textbooks can take some of the credit for this state of affair.” The article written by “The New York Times” ‘The Land of Opportunity?’ is mainly about the question “When questioned about the enormous income inequality in the United States, the cheerleaders of America’s unfettered markets counter that everybody has a shot at becoming rich here. The distribution of income might be skewed, but America’s economic mobility is second to none.” In the third article written by “The Washington Post” ‘No Longer the Land of …show more content…
We are in a society where technology is advancing everyday, we have invented robots that can work for us, we have invented artificial heart, and artificial organs, but yet we can not write new textbooks to today 's level of knowledge? One thing that Loewen said was “textbooks’ treatments of events in labor history are never anchored in any analysis of social class. This amounts to delivering the footnotes instead of the lecture! Six dozen high school American history textbooks I examined contain no index listing at all for “social class,” social stratification,” ”class structure,” “income distribution,” “inequality,” or any conceivably related topic.” What Loewen is trying to say here that he has read 6 different American textbooks and none of them educated him on topics that take place today and need to be taught. Having old textbooks that do not educate us on stuff we need to learn for our future does not really help us at all. High school is almost a business now. They teach you to fail if you can’t learn then they say you’re dumb, not everyone can just catch up at the same pace as someone else. They just teach us students without preparing us for the real world and end up just dumping us out with a