Blog #5

Not only did the board of education fire brown, but they took action on his family too.  The board of education fires Brown’s wife, two of sisters, and his niece.  They also burned his house down.  Brown was also a pastor at a church, and they fired him for that, and they also stoned the church, and shot weapons at him.  It really is a shame that Brown had to deal with this at this time.  It goes to show how much religion was involved in the school system. “Though the issue of equal educational opportunity remains serious business, virtually no one today thinks of it as an issue that one might have to die for” (124).  It really is eye-opening to see what people had to deal with back then.  Luckily, we do not have these severe of problems, but we have problems of our own in the school system.

African-Americans were discriminated on during this time in the school, and that is why they need protection when they went to school in Little Rock.  The protection was provided by the 101^st Airborne.  The 101^st Airborn’s job was to keep school in session for the nine African-American teenagers that were attending school there. “I will always be grateful to the men of the 101^st Airborne, who did their personal best to protect us from attacks” (124).  This quote was said by Melba Pattillo Beals, who was one of the nine students to attend the high school in Little Rock.

The problems that we deal with now are not so much discrimination of the school system, but discrimination between classmates.  One big problem that is evident in todays generation, as seen on the news, social media, etc. is the amount of bullying that goes on in schools these days.  The bullying sometimes is so bad that students end up committing suicide.  Another problem with the bullying is that the staff seems to do nothing about it, although they claim that they are.  For example, somebody I know has hearing problems, and was being bullied badly by the football team, and coach.  When the mother went to speak to somebody about this issue, they said they would take care of it.  The reason that I know it was not taken care of was because she posted something on a Facebook page about the issue, and if there was anything that anybody else could do to help her son.  The other players were doing things such as purposely whispering in the huddle or screaming loudly into the kids ears.  The kid has permanent hearing aids because his hearing is so bad.  While this is bad as it sounds, the worst part was that the mother reached out to one of the kids father that was a large part in the bullying and the father did not give a crap about it.  To make it even worse, the kid that they are bullying has no father because he passed away from cancer.

Although we are at a different time in the current generation than previous, there still are issues that seem to happen that need to be taken care of.  Whether its bullying, or discriminating it all needs to stop.  Of course, in the future we are going to see more issues, one that I can think off the top of my head is the whole transgender issue.  The schools need to do their absolute best to work to resolve these issues