| As an educator in the California Community College system, I spend the majority of my time trying to pull students from the raging waters of what can only be called “the system”. These disenfranchised students—always poor and almost always of color—have inspired me to examine why they are often smothered by bureaucratic ineptitude that seems somehow designed to keep them poor and disenfranchised. The purpose of this work is therefore to examine why and how “equal opportunity” is complicated by who we are and what we bring with us into the higher educational system.; Inequalities have been formed via the development of American culture. In fact, the development of bureaucratic power, augmented particularly by the industrial revolution, has generated distinct representations of power that are sanctioned and reinforced through mainstream American socially-condoned parenting styles, the American educational system, and the American corporate workplace. These representations of power are further reinforced and validated by the Law as well as by mainstream media. The gaze of power, or what can be called the bureaucratic gaze, has permeated the American educational system specifically and American society in general to such an extent that this gaze has been literally internalized, generating a form of self-suppression and alienation that erodes students' potential for creativity and individual thought.; The American public system of education, along with the aforementioned manifestations of “the system”, has hence become a bureaucratic labyrinth of its own, fostering and enhancing the alienation and consumerism endorsed by American mainstream culture at large. The American public education system thus literally teaches subordination and differentiation of “the other”, or all that does not represent mainstream culture. Nevertheless, opportunities exist to create a less alienating culture, and to deconstruct the fabric of desire based on endless acquisition, both within the classroom and beyond. Promotion of the participation and inclusion of children in society, deconstruction of the subject/object dichotomy, reclamation of the power of thought, and deconstruction of the Western concept of “time” are strategies whereby a more productive interrelatedness may be established, thus creating the possibility of genuine equal opportunity for all. |
