Historical Impact on Minority Populations in Public Schools

Historical Impact on Minority Populations in Public Schools

Introduction

In the last century, minority population has migrated in a great number to America. As a result, public schools had to accommodate a large number of minority population. Throughout the history, many minority students have been facing forced assimilation to mainstream cultural values (Heath, 2011). This forced assimilation has primarily been a result of state policies and programs that emerged by way of education to assimilate minority population. The prime example of forced assimilation is that of American Indian children which occurred in 1890s. These children were deactivated from American schools and sent back to India where they were forced to learn English and were prohibited to speak their mother language.

This effort was made to eliminate Indian culture among the children to create forced assimilation. Another important term that is discussed in this paper is acculturation of minority population students. The acculturation is a process of transformation of cultural patterns of a society determined by agreement between direct and prolonged groups of people from different cultures with different traditions and language, values ??and behaviors. This paper discusses the concepts of assimilation and acculturation in America keeping in mind both the historical and current perspective.

Discussion

Difference between Assimilation and Acculturation

Assimilation is a process of integration when individuals of a minority group or immigrants are engrossed into a larger group of people or community (Richard and Victor, 2003). As a result of this engrossment, the concerned individual loses his original customs, traditions, language, identity and ethnicity. The one-sided, often deliberately induced alignment of the culture of a minority to the majority is also referred to as assimilation. On the other hand, acculturation is a process of transformation of cultural patterns of a society determined by agreement between direct and prolonged groups of people from different cultures with different traditions and language, values ??and behaviors. Unlike assimilation, individuals who indulge in acculturation do not lose their identity and ethnicity, however these factors become altered. As an object of study of sociology, acculturation may have originated from the imposition of a hegemonic cultural model, or by assimilation of specific elements of cultural models.

Acculturation leads to a voluntary cultural assimilation. This can lead to assimilation in the sense of giving up cultural identity or for the successful integration of the purposes of maintaining their own cultural characteristics. Assimilation is a very common term in social science texts and generally in the academic environment, its meaning continues to be confusing at times and not without controversy among authors, either because of their origin, application or even appropriate translation for each language, of course, the term acculturation does not come from nothing or from a spontaneous thought, and its application or use may be different depending on the discipline or even the author (Sumida, 2000). The term began to be used as a replacement for other widely used terms in the environment, such as cultural contact and cultural ...