Intelligence In Education

(33) Growing up as a Latino male in the United States, I was presented with many social conflicts that had the possibility to hinder my future success as an individual. Looking back at my own childhood, I have come to understand that still to this day, many immigrant teens lack the presence of their parents throughout their development from a teenager to an adult. Though it can be argued, that a parent has a moral responsibility to assure that their child grows up as a law abiding citizen; one who sees deviancy and crime as wrong, the fact of the matter is that many times immigrants family must work multiple jobs paying at minimum wage, to barely sustain their families and stay afloat. The term “where are the parents?” is a common solution …show more content…
For many, intelligence relates to the idea of possessing the ability to communicate effectively either through writing or verbally; for others, intelligence can translate to solving numerical equations or having the classification of a “math-genius”. Though there are many different methods for an individual to illustrate his or hers intelligence, I have found through my own personal experiences, that many “intelligent” individuals lack the possession of cultural knowledge. As a college student, I have become aware that for the most part, the average student is concern with developing associations and relationships rather than having a thoughtful conversation about race & ethnic relations. As a Criminal Justice & Criminology student, I, for the most part, was previously concerned with how deviancy and criminal behavior affected our society; not thinking that perhaps the driven sociological stereotypes based on race, ethnicity, or even socioeconomic status, have the ability to illustrate things that go in correlation with my field of study such as mass incarceration, and prison population. With the idea that we all play an active role in addressing the issues affecting our communities, I stand strong to the belief that in order to increase one’s social competence and become an advocate for those different social issues, one must first, set out to increase their overall cultural knowledge. Though increasing one’s cultural knowledge can sound like a …show more content…
Though it is an untypical term (at least in my opinion), I stand strong to the belief that nearly everyone at some point has utilized or done what the term entails. To briefly and accurately summarize the term, I will rely on a phrase utilized by Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer on their book Racial Domination, Racial Progress the Sociology of Race in America that states “we are free of prejudice” (524). To start off, I will admit that I personally thought I was free of prejudice; I thought to myself, that because I came from a Latino background (a minority background), that I did not have the ability to engage in prejudice behavior, or have thoughts along prejudiced lines towards other minorities alike. A good example that comes from a personal experience was something that despite I thought I didn’t, I actually did. Before I found out that I treated people differently given their skin color or ethnicity, I stood firmly to the belief that I treated everyone the same. Perhaps my actions were driven because of the sociological stereotyped belief standing behind different groups’ of people; I will admit, that many times before gaining a superior cultural knowledge, I will apply and depend on the beliefs of society to describe a group of individuals. To be more exact, I thought to be true what we see in the news mostly every day, that African Americans are a menace to our