Essay: Sam Horn
ESSAY: SAM HORN
THE CORRELATION BETWEEN YOUTH EDUCATION AND CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: HOW TIME TO RISE IS WORKING TO MITIGATE THESE PROBLEMS
Education is a vital aspect of children’s early development. A child’s ability to learn and think will offer future success while providing these children with the opportunity to be a contributor to society. Education is a gift that one can use to affect humanity. As Nelson Mandela states, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Yet, in many schools across the world, young children are compounded with issues that affect their path to finding a vision of the future. The detrimental aspects within a child’s upbringing are poorly affecting their educational and youth development. Furthermore, harmful elements of a child’s upbringing can drain inspiration for learning, hinder ability to have independent thought, and inhibit a vision of the future. During a child’s development, their family’s socioeconomic situation, relationship with their parent(s), and lack of their school’s educational resources lead to their detriment. A family’s socioeconomic environment plays a major role in the child’s ability to develop. The American Psychological Association researched the effect of socioeconomic status on early childhood development. The group defined socioeconomic status as “quality of life attributes as well as opportunities and privileges afforded to people within society.” Within their findings, the association found that socioeconomic status, also known as SES, “affects overall human functioning,” explaining how a family’s SES can contribute to the benefit or detriment of their “physical or mental health.” SES can drastically alter a child’s stress and anxiety levels while changing their behavior based on their socioeconomic status. The American Psychological Association determined that SES affects their educational abilities, not just their psychological and physical health. The group discovered that socioeconomic status has a series of effects on a child’s educational outcome. For example, “Low SES and [high] exposure to adversity are [directly] linked to decreased educational… [achievements]” (“Children, Youth, Families and Socioeconomic Status”). Also, influences and experiences at a young age can have a “lasting impact on learning” their “linguistic, cognitive, and socio-emotional skills.” Furthermore, children who were a part of a poor socioeconomic family status were more likely to have “significantly less linguistic knowledge,” and have average literary skills “five years behind those of high-income students.” Likewise, their abilities in mathematics are negatively impacted. The American Psychological Association determined that children from impoverished families “score at least ten percent lower than the national average” in mathematics. Children with low SES are oftentimes, “more likely to be absent from school through their educational experiences.” This not only hurts their intellectual abilities but also “increases the learning gap between them and their wealthier” classmates (“Children, Youth, Families and Socioeconomic Status”). Furthermore, the dropout rates of high school students in impoverished environments have increased, while the national rates of high school dropouts have continually decreased. Students who fall in the low socioeconomic status category are “five times” more likely to “fail to graduate”
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