Education and the Environment in Sociology.

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Sociology

Today, there is increasing pressure, not only on businesses and adults in the workplace, but also upon young people and children, to perform better. Indeed, schools have responded to the increasing pressures of the job market by focusing on specific subject fields in terms of raising their standards. According to Huffman (2014), for example, high school curricula place emphasis on the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and math). The purpose of this emphasis is to create a population of graduates who are better equipped for job markets in need of labor force input.

On the reverse side, however, the emphasis on these subjects and increasingly high standards creates a situation in which students simply cannot keep up. This inability to handle the workload and complicated nature of the subject fields includes the danger of higher dropout rates. Hence, the good intentions of raising academic standards become thwarted with the danger of achieving the opposite of the intended effect: Higher dropout rates lead to even fewer graduates who can mitigate the needs of the increasingly complicated market (Huffman, 2014). Indeed, the grim irony is that the increase of graduation requirements for high school also incrementally increased the dropout rates throughout the United States.

2. The most fundamental level at which American schools differ from those in India and Far Eastern countries like Japan is the cumulative hours for which children are exposed to schooling. According to Ballard (2012), this creates a serious deficit for American children, who graduate high school at an intellectual and prowess level that is not globally competitive. Ballard's (2012) estimate is that Chinese children spend approximately 6-8 more years in high school than American children do, calculated according to the additional days of schooling in the country. This in itself gives Eastern countries an advantage over American children.

Another contrast is the attention to public schooling. In countries such as India, for example, public education is considered part and parcel of national economic success. For the United States, however, public education is considered to be a social issue rather than an economic necessity. Hence, when the economy suffers, so do social programs, including the public school system.

A third factor is that Eastern parents tend to spend much more time with their children than American parents. Parents in India and Japan are also much more concerned with the quality of their children's education than parents in the States.

3. Health care in the United States has received a large amount of attention over recent years, as President Obama attempted to create a system that would provide all citizens with this basic right. There are a number of health care systems created by high income nations across the world. The most common of these is universal health care (Shah, 2011). With the exception of the United States, all high-income countries have some form of universal health care. Britain, for example, has the National Health System (NHS), which is a government-run, tax-funded establishment. Canada and France have privately run systems, where the government funds most of the medical care needs of citizens. Switzerland operates on the basis of private insurance companies, with systems like subsidies and regulation in place to ensure universal coverage for all.

The United States operates on the basis of health care systems for various populations such as the elderly, military service families, the disabled, children, some of the poor population, and so on. Many, however, have no insurance while others are "underinsured."

On the basis of the above, it appears that Universal Care is most suitable for countries with more than 300 million citizens. To counteract the burden on state funding, a system that is partially funded by the government and partially by health care users is probably best.

4. Fertility can refer to two concepts, depending upon whether one is referring to individuals within a population or the trends across a population collectively. When referring to individuals, fertility refers to the optimal years for individuals to have children. Fertility in women is typically considered to be between the early teens and mid forties (Goodyear, 2008). Men tend to be fertile throughout their adulthood, although the sperm count will tend towards lower levels from middle age.

In terms of the collective population, the term "fertility" refers to the birth rate, expressed as number of children born per fertile woman in the country. "Mortality," on the other hand, refers to the rate and age at which people typically die. Typically, mortality is highest among infants and the elderly.

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Population growth or decline is affected by the balance between fertility and mortality. In cases where disasters such as plagues or war occur, the mortality of a specific population (such as young men during times of war) affects the fertility rate and balance of citizens in a country. This can, in turn, also affect fertility, since the unnatural death of many fertile men and/or women will mean fewer births and a decline in collective fertility.

5. The symbolic interaction approach operates under the assumption that a person forms a self-concept on the strength of symbolic gestures, words, actions, etc. that others perform and the interpretation of these. In a classroom, this assumption is extended to the student-teacher relationship. It refers to the fact that students tend to perform according to what they interpret as the teacher's expectation of them. On the positive side, this could mean that a teacher could use words, actions, and gestures to encourage students to perform at their highest possible level. When students interpret a teacher's expectation to be higher than their current level of performance, this is said to encourage them to perform better.

There can, however, also be a negative side. For weaker students, teachers might display, consciously or subconsciously, relatively low expectations. This means that these students are never encouraged beyond what teachers believe they can do; they are never challenged. This creates a situation in which these students remain in a poor performing habit, probably throughout their school career. A teacher who is mindful of this danger, however, can use symbolic interactionism to create higher expectations for all students at all levels in the classroom.

6. Since the 1960s and 1970s, there has been a continuous rise in consciousness relating to environmental matters throughout the world. Nevertheless, technological advancement has grown much faster than social consciousness about the need to conserve the environment, and an environmental deficit has begun to occur.

The environmental deficit refers to the yearly estimate of natural resource consumption to a point at which the biosphere cannot replace resources and safely absorb damage within a twelve-month period; thus a deficit is created by what humanity consumes within a year and what can be replaced by the biosphere during the same period. According to Simms (2013), this deficit grows larger every year. This fact is not helped by the rising population across the world. The main reason for this is that technological advancement has created a world in which human life is no longer as dependent on the elements as other life forms.

Health is one area affected in this way. Because of advances in medical science, human beings can live much longer than in the past, particularly in wealthy countries. This creates a population in which the fertility rate is higher than the mortality rate, creating ever growing numbers of people. This, in turn, creates the need to feed such a growing population. This is also done with technology, with chemicals and genetic engineering barely keeping up with the growing demand for food. The problem is that the technology to produce increasing crops tends to create further deficits within the environment. The fact that cropland is not given time to replenish itself before sowing the next crop creates a situation in which the soil is eventually exhausted. With diminishing soil available for use, forests are being destroyed to make more room for crop growing.

Forests, however, are an essential part of ensuring the environmental longevity of the planet. Destroying these in favor of growing crops further enlarges the environmental deficit. In many ways, human beings have grown too clever for their own good. Having extended our longevity with technology, we need to supply food for longer-living populations. Having done with technology by planting bigger genetically engineered crops, we are in the process of destroying valuable and essential natural resources. It appears that technology has created a world in which humanity lives such a leisurely and comfortable life, that we have forgotten that the resources we use so liberally are in fact finite unless we care for the environment that must replenish them.

It therefore does appear that the more technologically advanced humanity becomes, the bigger the environmental deficit. It appears to be in our nature not only to destroy ourselves, but also to do so with as much greed and excess as we can muster. Governments, leaders, and social scientists seem less concerned with conserving energy and resources than they are.....

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