Lower-SES and Online School

Welcome to Man Reason!!! So, complainers, i like to call them haters, say that i focus to much on sex and all stuff sexual. Well i figured i answer their complaints and expand my audience by being intellectual once in a while.  I started to think how technology could actually improve the lower-SES families and environments with online schooling. Unfortunately, for this argument I have no factual data to base this on and have did no research. This blog is strictly opinion based on a true story. Welcome to Man Reason!!!!

How Online Schooling Can Help Lower-SES Families

Status, social pressure, and social acceptance are three factors that affect every child today, but in a lower-SES neighborhood, these three factors can lead a child into life making bad decisions leading him/her into life changing and life threatening situations. These three factors negative affects can be reduced if lower-SES neighborhoods would adopt online schooling as an option.

Imagine sending your one and only beloved child to a school which ranks last in the nation, has no actual school text books, and the student death rate is higher than the graduation rate. Those factors alone are enough to convince me to keep my child at home, but those are extreme. Let’s take something less extreme. Imagine sending your child to a school where he/she is not popular and constantly picked on by the more popular kids causing him/her to be considered a social outcast. This affects your child’s self-esteem (real or not). To be accepted by one’s peers is what I will call social acceptance. Also, what I consider social acceptance is being part of something that gain some status or gives a since of belonging. This is what I would consider leads most children into gangs. The more a peer is socially accepted the higher one’s status is within that social world.

Drugs use, alcohol use, and often teen pregnancy can often be attributed to social pressure. Social pressure, or peer pressure to some, is the other factor that affects not only lower-SES children but also all children, though for this post I will only be focusing on the lower-SES.

So how does online schooling help reducing the negative affects of these factors? Remove and improve. No longer would lower-SES parents have to worry about their children going to a troubled school where their lives may be threatened due to not having to leave the home (remove). This allows also for the lower-SES families not to have to settle for the local school, being that it would be online learning, a lower-SES could settle for a school with merit. With a child in a more prestige’ school, lower-SES families, though under educated, may feel the need to assist more in the actual education of their child knowing that more opportunities will be available for their child if they succeed. The same can be seen in parents of athletic children from lower-SES families. As the child potential of having a productive finically stable life increases, the family takes more initiative in the child’s education and life. Funding for books would be irrelevent since all educational material could be digital (improve).

By also removing the child from school, the social acceptance and social pressure within the school is decreased. This decreases the chances of the lower-SES child from being introduced to drugs, alcohol, gangs, and sex within the school system. Which then would possibly also decrease the lower-SES neighborhoods drug and alcohol usage and teen parents whom may be unable to properly care for a child. The removal of the child from school reduces the chances of that child experiencing social un-acceptance which could lead to depression and other mental uneasiness that lead to needing anti-depressant drugs or committing suicide.

Rebuttal anyone? Ok, your child is not needing to be a hermit, and I can hear people questioning on how does your child learn how to socially interact without social interactions? I’m not saying that your child should be in online schooling at the pre-school age, where some social interaction learning takes place. Neither am I saying this is the cure all in lower-SES neighborhoods since these neighborhoods, I would recommend, still have after school type programs and other community functions that would encourage positive social interactions. All I am saying, first you have to change the environment.

Man Reason

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