Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Additional Influences
Parents and teachers worry about the influence of the media on adolescents, par-
ticularly in regard to overexposure to violence, sexual activity, and material con-
sumption. Students seldom expressed such concern about their own vulnerability
to this influence. One teacher offered an explanation for some students’ disruptive
behavior:
A lot of violence in America, too much violence . . . . From their infancy,
parents are setting them in front of the TV set, as a babysitter. And the car-
toons are violent . . . . They don’t have to go to a show, or an X-rated
movie, all they have to do is turn on a TV set. They’ve seen everything, and
what the eyes consume, ok—eventually you act it out.
In the minds of some parents and teachers, the lure of money and the perceived
need to acquire material goods seem to loom as a large threat to academic engage-
ment. Not only do they worry that students may be making poor choices that put
immediate material gratification ahead of education, but they question parents’
roles in this process. One teacher told of a mother ‘‘washing clothes in a bucket,
she doesn’t have money to go to the laundromat, but yet in the same breath, she
said to me, ‘yeah she will get those $110 dollar shoes.’’’ In some of the schools
we visited, rules had been instituted prohibiting gold jewelry and leather jackets
for multiple reasons, and some had developed dress codes to prevent further so-

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cial comparison and the threat of violence. A mother of an eighth-grader at Metro-
politan was asked why some students might not believe school is important. She
responded:
People—kids—can see drug dealers and they can see the gang and they are
driving around in a Cadillac and people that work for a living driving around
a little junky car . . . . Kids’ don’t quite understand yet . . . . You’ve got
kids that have either their parents on welfare or food stamps or whatever, they
gotta have clothes, have this, and their parents aren’t working. So what’s the
connection between school and a job?
The immediate pressure to have money now, the lack of positive role models in
the immediate environment, and the lure of material goods may make it difficult
for some to stay focused on school or to believe that schoolwork is worthwhile.