Cheryl Wood (Blog 7)

This week’s chapter deals with structural and social inequalities in schooling. Life chances are influenced by different characteristics people have. These two types of characteristics include Ascribed characteristics being those features of individuals that they are born with such as race, sex, and social class of one’s family and Achieved characteristics being the characteristics chosen by individual effort such as personal skills and occupational designations (page 193). This chapter focus more on ascribed characteristic rather than achieved characteristics.

School readiness is one of the reasons why some students do not succeed in school. “School readiness refers to a child’s developmental stage at which he or she is able to participate in and benefit from early learning experiences.” (Page 195).   Many families are from low socioeconomic families and cannot afford to buy specific resourced geared to their child’s learning. So many students don’t have structure outside of school. In today’s society there are so many families being dual income providers, single parent families and broken up families due to divorce. This has an effect on the student’s education.  Many times children are at home alone or with siblings they don’t have parents there to reinforce rules and learning. There is less support at home and the students tend to do less with their lives than those who come from intact families as mentioned on page 199. The text also states that lone parent students are more likely to drop out of school and not pursue post-secondary education. 

We all are affected in some way by ascribed characteristics. Some of us benefit from our ascribed characteristics where others suffer because of them. For me, I am a female and in my workplace I get paid less than the males who work at my workplace. Our pay is not based off of work ethic by any means. Some of the males are really good at disappearing and fooling around and yet this has no affect on their pay. I do my job when I'm at work and don't do what a few of the males do and I have a lower wage than they do.  In this case gender plays a role in the wage people receive at my work place which can be rather frustrating. 

Discussion Question:

What ascribed characteristics have impacted your life and in what way?