Social Inclusion And Social Exclusion

It is no secret to anyone who has attended; high school isn 't easy for those who attend. Students must learn to effectively navigate rigorous academic, political and social pathways. To take a wrong turn on one of these pathways is to tip the highly unstable scales from social inclusion to social exclusion. Social exclusion manifests itself in many ways: failing grades, poor attendance, isolation, and (as advertised most frequently in media campaigns) bullying. Bullying, imagineably, easily includes and leads to poor academic performance, attendance, and also varying degrees of isolation. According to Bill Page in his book "At Risk Students," these consequences form when a student has not navigated the academic, political and social pathways in a "successful" manner- one that will lead to graduation- and instead become "at risk students." (24). When a student has certain pathways made unavailable, often due to race, class, gender or sexuality, socially exclusionary symptoms of a school system not designed for everyone, in what can only be describes as status hierarchy, manifest themselves.
The Students Who are Excluded
For a student who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, …show more content…
Within this break-down, Freire points out the relationship between a school 's priority of good grades and a good image, and a school 's neglected duty to support the students within it (88-89). For a teacher to kick out a bullying victim because they are "disrupting" a classroom, the school 's policies and facilitators have clearly shown that student that they have no value- they have no right to be in that classroom when the school is working so hard to have a perfect academic record and appearance. They are effectively supporting worldly standards of success for an entire institution and not the needs of their students; those needs of the student have been sacrificed for "greater causes" like