The United States of America is a nation comprised of many different ethnicities and cultures, and that is what makes this country so great. So why are certain people trying to withhold the history from adolescents by removing Ethnic studies? Former Attorney General of Arizona Tom Horne argued that Ethnic studies classes would cause students to disenfranchise themselves because of the oppression their ancestors went through. Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, rebuttals this statement claiming that refusing these classes to students would lead students to be less aware of each other’s cultures and withholding the past struggles of their racial heritage with an ostrich approach is truly oppressive. Both sides even refer to German Philosopher Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book that claims our schools are oppressive by turning students such as yourselves into sheep that will all look and act the same, which is what Tom Horne is doing by removing Ethnic studies from Arizona schools. So, should Ethnic studies be taught in high school with all the controversial claims of it causing students to …show more content…
Freire further asserts “The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation of individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.” (Freire) The German philosopher explains that to be fully human we must not allow people to take away what makes us different, but in the act of understanding what makes us different, and this cannot happen with the oppression of the students’ education. If ethnic studies are taken away from high school students, they will be losing the chance to learn what makes them