Social Inequalities

Racial inequality is not only a product of our current society, but the concept of race itself is a product of current and past societies. There is no fundamental difference between Caucasian Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans or any other Americans. The only differences that exist are the differences that people throughout the past have imposed on these racial groups. The problem is that because these differences have been imposed for so long, some of them have begun to take hold at least in superficial ways. Anyon points out very clearly throughout her book that the literacy levels, income levels, access to things like health care and healthy food, along with many other things, are just not equal between white and black Americans.[1] These differences in skin color really have nothing to do with it except that people with darker skin pigments were forced into bad neighborhoods, bad schools, bad jobs, etc. for many years and now that historical act has become a very difficult to break cycle. The fact of the matter is that bad neighborhoods produce enough bad kids to keep the neighborhoods bad and the same goes for schools and jobs. The problem we face is that now that we have already gotten this cycle going, how do we end it? How do we go about working to help the bad neighborhoods become good neighborhoods in a way that actually works?

The same problems exist with socio-economic inequalities. Our entire economic system is based on the fact that there are inequalities between people. People need to work harder to earn more money to buy more things to improve their lives. If there were no inequalities, there would be no motivation for any individual person to work hard or even work at all because everyone else will still work and we’ll all still be in the same situation anyway. It is precisely the issue of what went wrong with the socialist/communist movement in the USSR (obviously not the only thing that went wrong, but a major factor in why the movement ultimately failed). There were too many people who were dissatisfied at getting no relative gain out of working harder or even just pulling their own weight.[2] Socialism and communism are wonderful ideas in principle, but due to the corrupt nature of humans, it just does not work on a large scale.

Because of these issues I see with the ideas of many of the educational/social philosophers, I have a hard time knowing what to do, myself, about the social issues facing the educational system. I look at the ideas of people like Anyon, Greene and even Blomberg and I recognize the beauty and the virtue of their visions, but at the same time, I see them as far too idealistic to actually work in the real world. A big part of my problem with what I see as a kind of “call to arms” from these philosophers is how they interact with my view of human nature. Because I believe humans to be naturally corrupt, I do not believe that these idealistic visions for the future could ever be realized. I have no problems with people trying to implement plans to improve the inequalities that exist in our society, but I also have no faith that they will actually solve anything. Throughout the world, political and social reform rarely improves situations as a whole for any extended period of time. The inequalities of a nation or society do not go away after a revolution, they simply change and generally get more difficult to distinguish.

[1] Anyon, Jean. Radical Possibilities. New York: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2005.

[2] Lovell, Tom. "The Fall Of The Soviet Union: Whys And Wherefores." The Raleigh Tavern Philosophical Society. http://www.raleightavern.org/lovell.htm.

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