To a majority of students, school is already a challenging environment. They must juggle achieving good grades, maintaining social lives, and attending extracurricular activities, all during the trying time known as development. While some learn to thrive in this environment and see school, and in turn education, as a positive entity, others still see it as harmful and useless. The attitude one has towards education is due to differences in socioeconomic status, environment, and the value of education in the society. One factor that influences a student’s attitude towards education is the socioeconomic status of the student’s family. Socioeconomic status usually refers to the amount of income a family receives each year. Often times, students…show more content… Jeff Sapp starts off by explaining how he thought he was rich until third grade, when a classmate called him “‘poor, white trash’” and states later that he “felt shame” when his easter egg wasn’t as good as his classmates’. Evidently, Sapp was raised in a school environment where it was either okay to ridicule others for their differences, or it was simply ignored, as shown by the Sapp’s not mentioning of any teacher intervention. Regardless, the constant belittling likely made Sapp feel that education and teachers were at fault. This attitude made Sapp himself become a teacher in order to prevent students to develop a similar attitude. Furthermore, Eric Jensen mentions that if parents provide “insufficient nurturing, negativity, and a general failure to focus on children's needs” the child will grow up with poor social skills and lower than average academic performance. By being different from their peers, this child will face bullying, similar to Jeff Sapp, and develop a similarly negative attitude towards school. This means that the condition a child is raised in is an important factor in how a child views…show more content… Marc Silver describes how many girls in Aftica “‘want to go to school’”. Such a positive attitude is likely because to them, education is a way to escape the monotony of the life of an African farmer. In their lives, choices for occupation are limited, and those available often involve difficult lives and hard labor. Education offers a way out of the difficult life, so students would obviously view education positively. In contrast, Mark Bauerlein describes the aversion American students show towards learning in his article “The Anti-Intellectual Environment of American Teens”. Their aversion to learning outside of school is because society makes it appear that education isn’t necessary for success. This lowers the value of education in stidents’ minds and leads to the attitude that Bauerlein
