Education, Language, and Social Mobility

First Draft Due Thursday, May 6, 2004 (3 pages minimum; bring 4 copies)
Final Draft Due Tuesday, May 18, 2004 (5 full pages minimum)

Richards is very concerned with the challenges faced by African-American students at Colgate. Part of the problem, as he sees it, is that his school is not completely honest with prospective black students before they come to Colgate. As he puts it, these students are “sold a bill of goods” (635). In effect, they are deceived into thinking that they will fit right into the culture at Colgate. Part of Richards’ solution is to recruit “black students who have already succeeded in the integrated social and academic worlds of prep schools or elite suburban high schools” (635).

Your assignment is to write a 5-page essay in which explore the challenge of minority academic and social achievement in America. You must work with Richards, Tan, and Baldwin.

There are a number of ways to work with the texts to develop your essay.

You might, for example, examine how difficult it is for blacks to fit in at Colgate by working with Baldwin’s idea that one cannot really learn if he must “repudiate his experience […] and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white” (534). What might a black student at Colgate be “repudiating” in trying to fit into Colgate? But what are the costs of not “repudiating” experience? Might Richards’ solution reduce the necessity for such repudiation?

Tan writes about how teachers steered Asian students “away from writing into math and science” (72). You might explore this practice alongside what Richards says happens to African-American students at Colgate. Or, extending ideas from the Baldwin passage above, what do Asian students “repudiate” in following these teachers’ advice?

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