On McDermott and Verenne's article "Reconstructing Culture in Educational Research"

This article made me think of the following expression: Instead of blaming the one who is victimized, blame the one who or that which creates the problem.

Thus, the success/failure rates in American schools should not be attributed to the individual, but rather to the institutions, organizations, and the culture of which he/she is a part. We should not try to change our students but our culture and education system, our methods of tracking and categorizing students, and our ways to label them as low-achievers and high-achievers.

"Why should kids be the focus of change when it is the rest of us--the culture that is acquiring them--that arranges their trouble? ", state the authors. Therefore, we, as teachers and researchers, should analyze culture itself, that is, the educational institutions, their administrative and instructional policies, as well as their historical backgrounds. When we identify the root of the problem, we should find aim at "transforming and tampering with" those policies that marginalize students on the basis of social class, gender and race.

Cultural analysis, "like school reform, requires we take persons seriously while analytically looking through them ...to the world with which they are struggling," the authors argue. In other words, we try to see the world around us through the lens of the marginalized, the oppressed, in an effort to find ways to create a better, more democratic world.

This is a very idealistic model, I should say, one that I agree with, and yet a task that is not easy to achieve. We are talking about opportunity for all, social change, social justice, and academic equality. If we continue to have an educational system that favors white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant views and imposes them on linguistically and ethnically diverse student population, the outcome is a monolingual, monocultural world.

Americans shoud aim at familiarizing themselves both linguistically and culturally with other nations, their customs, traditions, and views. They should acknowledge and respect foreign scholars' research and their contribution to existing knowledge. They should perhaps try to learn a foreign language and travel to the country where the target language is spoken. Only then can they perhaps understand the difficulties the "other" is encountering in America.