Question

Write a project on Education in Slums

Answer 1

Hope for solving the massive social problems associated with urban poverty appears to center increasingly on improvement in the methods of educating the culturally deprived children of the slums. Educators have long recognized that such children enter school under handicaps not imposed on children of the middle class, that slum children often seem immune to standard instructional programs, and that a relatively large proportion of them quit school early and become misfits and unemployables. Some inevitably drift into delinquency.

Early efforts to increase the less fortunate child's capacity to learn took the form chiefly of remedial classes, of shifting the child from academic to shop or manual training work, and of providing extra services ranging anywhere from free meals to field trips. It is generally realized, however, that the slum child's maladjustment to school is often too deep and too complex to be affected1 by routine or piecemeal palliatives.

After considerable research and experimentation during the past decade, educators have now come to the conclusion that major changes in policies and programming are necessary to make the public school a place of learning for the slum child. Blueprints for radical overhaul of city schools have been drawn up, and some of the proposed changes have already been put into practice.

Pressure for Hard Look at Education in Slums

Numerous factors have combined to intensify demands that more realistic provisions be made for the education of disadvantaged city children. Growing severity of the problems that have always afflicted slum populations has pointed up weaknesses in the traditional agencies for human betterment. The large number of retarded pupils and dropouts among poor children, for example, offers evidence that compulsory education no longer serves as an effective means of equalizing opportunity for economic and social advancement.

Rising tensions and high rates of crime and of street disorders in slum districts are believed to stem in large measure from frustrations and hostilities prevalent among the poorly educated youths who live there and who are not fitted for regular employment. Participation of teenagers and young hoodlums in the riots in slum sections of New York City, Jersey City, Philadelphia and other cities last summer seemed to bear out the warnings of James Bryant Conant several years ago that the jobless, out-of-school youth of city slums would become “social dynamite…[and] a serious threat to our free society” if measures were not taken to give them a proper education.1