A Mothers Legacy In Mary Shelleys Mathilda Essay Example for Free

A Mothers Legacy In Mary Shelleys Mathilda Essay Abstract Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley are two writers whose ideas are likely to be similar. Shelley admits that she is influenced by her mother. Therefore, the purpose of this essay is to find out and to identify the ideas presented in Wollstonecrafts essay on womens rights A Vindication for the Rights of Woman (1792) and see if they are incorporated into Shelleys novella Mathilda (1819). My analysis of A Vindication for the Rights of Woman shows that Wollstonecrafts main ideas are that limited education, the subjugation of women by the family, female dependency on men and romantic thinking are the source for womens inferiority. This essay identifies and examines these ideas in the light of some secondary material and tries to suggest that they are visible as themes in Shelleys Mathilda. In Mathilda, these ideas are visible as themes throughout the novel. The tragedy that befalls the characters illustrates the immoral and self-destructive tendencies which women obtain when being subject to these conditions. On the other hand, Shelley does not emphasize a lack of education and offers an additional point of view where Wollstonecrafts views on motherhood are criticized. The conclusion drawn is that Wollstonecrafts ideas must have had an influence on Shelley as the fate of the characters is an illustration of the society that is criticized in A Vindication for the Rights of Woman and its destruction. However, Shelley does not agree on ideas with the subject of upbringing and goes against a few of her mothers main points, namely the role of mothers and the pre-eminence of education. They mostly have a consensus as most ideas that are present in one work are present in the other but Shelley has rebelled against some of her mothers notions.

Asian Exclusion Laws Essay -- essays research papers

There were a very large number of local, state, and federal laws that were specifically aimed at disrupting the flow of Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States. Two of the major laws were the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1907-1908 Gentleman’s Agreement. Although the laws had some differences, they were quite similar and had similar impacts on the immigrant population.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The 1882, Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, which outlawed Chinese immigration. It also explicitly denied naturalization rights to Chinese, meaning they were not allowed to become citizens, as they were not free whites. Prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act, some 300,000 laborers arrived in California, and the act was intended to primarily prevent the entry of more laborers. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first attempt by congress to ban a group of immigrants based on race or color.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The only Chinese that legally entered the United States during the six decades the Exclusion Act was in place were those in “exempted classes'; such as merchants, students, diplomats, and travelers (Chan). An unknown number illegally entered through the Canadian and Mexican borders and many others entered as “paper sons.'; The act did not prevent Chinese immigration per se; it simply prevented most legal immigration. The 1907-1908 Gentleman’s Agreement was the result of a conflict between t...

No Child Left Behind Act

With the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in early 2002, the Bush Administration put its stamp on the central federal law governing K-12 schooling, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) ratified in 1965. Throughout his campaign for the presidency, Bush summoned the ideas that are now law as a way to improve public education across the board, particularly for poor children. Vowing to end the soft prejudice of low expectations that he said has allowed too many poor children to fall enduringly behind in school, President Bush declared, â€Å"It's time to come together to get it (educational reform) done so that we can truthfully say in America, ‘No child will be left behind, not one single child'† Described in this way, the problem of low expectations proposes the solution most probably built into the provisions of No Child Left Behind: higher expectations. Though, the law needs not higher expectations which, after all, cannot be legislated but to a certain extent documented success, across the board and against a set of external standards. Expecting every child to succeed is one thing; needing that success is another. Supporters look upon the No Child Left Behind Act as a much-needed push in the right direction: a set of measures that will drive broad gains in student achievement as well as hold states and schools properly accountable for student progress. A number of critics see it fundamentally as a insincere set of demands, framed in an appealing language of expectations, that will force schools to fail on a scale large enough to rationalize shifting public dollars to private schools that is, as a political effort to reform public education out of existence through a policy of test and burn. (Levin, B. & Riffel, J, 1998). Sadly, No Child Left Behind appears, at best, to fix the wrong problem. The sanctions written into the law appear designed to compel teachers to teach and students to learn. Thus far, few children do not want to learn and few teachers do not want to teach. This is barely the biggest problem in struggling schools. What is missing is chance and support, not desire. Consider the gap between the reforms institutionalized through No Child Left Behind and the needs of John Essex, a high-poverty school in rural Demopolis, Alabama. The New York Times (Schemo, 2003b), reported: The truck full of stones showed up at John Essex School without explanation, as if some unnamed saint had heard Loretta McCoy's despair. As principal of this school in Alabama's rural Black Belt, Ms. McCoy struggles to find money for essentials: library books, musical instruments, supplies and teachers. So when the stones appeared, Ms. McCoy knew it might be the closest John Essex would get to landscaping and got pushing. A pile went by the back door, filing a huge pothole the children waded through when it rained. Another truckload filled a sinkhole by the Dumpsters, where garbage trucks got stuck in mud, and a third went to craters when the children took recess. Her pleading got John Essex five deliveries of rock: not enough to level the school's entrance, but enough to give its principal a small dose of hope. The K-12 school has 264 students, all poor and all Black. The building's cinder-block walls are unplastered, electrical lines are exposed, also the library includes books â€Å"that ponder how the Vietnam War will turn out† and â€Å"speak of landing on the moon as an ambitious dream† (Schemo, 2003b). Students have to master a foreign language to earn the academic diploma they require to get into college; however the school has no foreign language teacher, as well no art or music teacher. A few wrist bells comprise the school's collection of musical instruments. One person teaches chemistry, earth science, biology, and all the other science classes. Given the funding shortfalls and high failure rates extensively predicted for struggling schools like John Essex, it is hard to believe that sanctions are a good-faith prescription for accomplishment. Schools with fewer students and less funding will have even more difficulty attracting the best teachers, most of whom will prefer not to teach in a school branded failing. Though No Child Left Behind was signed into law with promises of not giving up on a single student, which proposes a commitment to ensuring that all children succeed, sanctions drive the law and almost make sure the opposite: failure. If this was not the case, if a state documented the success of each and every student that state no doubt would be criticized for cheating, grade inflation, or low standard. Pious platitudes regarding children being capable to learn and accountability for adequate yearly progress are poor substitutes for the cold, hard cash schools like John Essex need to attract good teachers and to finance the programs that might validate this rhetoric. While the federal contribution to total spending on public education is extremely small, about seven percent, the high-poverty schools most vulnerable to the sanctions rely excessively on this money. No Child Left Behind emerges not to address the very real problems in these schools, some of which rely on Title I dollars for more than a third of their spending, but somewhat to use those problems as a rationale for eroding public education. President Bush wanted to include vouchers for private schools in the No Child Left Behind law, however let this go when it became clear Congress would not pass the legislation with that provision. Debatably, however, No Child Left Behind lays the groundwork for exactly this result. The objective appears to be not to improve the quality of schooling for poor children, however rather to turn the problems of poor schools into a campaign to destroy public education. As growingly schools are deemed failing, the demand for vouchers likely will increase, paving the way for a transfer of students and funds to private schools. In the summer of 2003, the president invigorated his call for vouchers and backed a proposal to spend seventy-five million dollars in federal money on vouchers for private schools. Of the seventy-five million dollars, fifteen million dollars would go to families in Washington, DC for vouchers for two thousand of the sixty-seven thousand students in the district. The move came after a decision by the U. S. Supreme Court the year before that affirmed the constitutionality of permitting parents to use public funds to pay for religious and other private schooling. The case focused on a program in Cleveland, which offers private-school vouchers of up to $2,250 to approximately three thousand and seven hundred of the district's seventy-five thousand students. (Tozer, S. E., Violas, P. C., & Senese, G, 2002). Several students lack supports common in middle-class and rich households an adult at home in the evening, lots of books, and a quiet place to work. Others struggle to handle with the stress of living with constant economic insecurity evictions, homelessness, moving from place to place or of living in a community used by the larger society as a poisonous dumping ground. By paying no attention to this reality, No Child Left Behind continues the â€Å"blame-the-victim approach† that has long considered public schooling. Much more is needed than simply stating we now have high expectations for all children. Unaccompanied by a political commitment to construct a system where there is a cause to expect every child to succeed, such proclamations ridicule the ideals they bring to mind. Under the semblance of battling the soft bigotry of low expectations, policy-makers are moving in the incorrect direction in the long struggle to understand the ideal of equal educational opportunity. The stick side of the No Child Left Behind Act is operating: Schools not capable to meet annual achievement targets are being punished. Though, the carrot side of the law, something better for poor children in struggling schools, has not materialized. While funding for Title I has increased, it falls violently short of the realistic costs of achieving hundred percent proficiency. As the federal government reviewed states' plans for putting into practice No Child Left Behind in summer 2003, a related battle gathered steam when the Bush administration planned to overhaul Head Start, the federally funded preschool program that serves about one million of the nation's poorest 3- and 4-year-olds in community centers and schools. Under the proposal, the funding for the program would be distributed in block grants to states, under the control at first of up to eight governors. When Head Start was formed in 1965 as an initiative within the larger War on Poverty, then-President Lyndon Johnson intentionally avoided giving governors, antagonists in battles over civil rights, control over the program. (Levin, B. & Riffel, J, 1998). Critics of the proposal, including more than forty antipoverty and child welfare groups, protested that distributing Head Start dollars in block grants to states would take to bits the program by destroying the federal guarantee that the money will be used as originally planned namely, to provide an array of services to poor children, together with nutritional food, dental and health care, immunizations, as well as, in some centers, literacy programs for family members. To take this program away from communities this is a direct federal community program also hand it over to states without the national performance standards, without the requirements for complete services that make Head Start successful, and at a time when states are facing the biggest budget shortfalls in their history, is to destroy it. (Johnson, M, 2001). Under the proposal, Head Start employees would be needed to teach reading, writing, and math skills, and Head Start pupils would be required to partake in an assessment to find out if the new academic standards were being met. The proposal would need as a minimum half of all Head Start teachers to have 4-year college degrees by 2008, however would not require competitive salaries. Head Start teachers now earn merely about half the average salary of kindergarten teachers. Reference: Johnson, M. (2001, December). Making teaching boom proof: The future of the teaching profession. New Economy, 8(4), 203-207. This article describes how the staffing and retention of teachers could be enhanced to deal with national shortages. Levin, B. & Riffel, J. (1998, March). Conceptualising school change. Cambridge Journal of Education, 28(1), 113. This article attempts to discuss the implications for educational strategy makers suggested by the literature review Schemo, D. J. (2003b, July 11). Questions on data cloud luster of Houston schools. The New York Times. Retrieved from  Ã‚   http://www.nytimes.com This article discusses that hundreds of drop-outs were wrongly listed as transfers. Enrolment at alleged miracle high schools dropped noticeably during this time. Tozer, S. E., Violas, P. C., & Senese, G. (2002). School and society: Historical and contemporary perspectives (4th Ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill This text seeks to define an analytic framework that illustrates how and why certain school-society issues first took place in this country and how they transformed over time. In its assessment of the development of education in the United States, this text entails an engaging historical story.

Social Stratification In The Great Gatsby Analysis

Social Stratification in the Oh-So Great Gatsby Among numerous themes, including; the ‘American dream’, isolation, hope, love and various others, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby, the allure of social stratification is the most significant element. Social stratification is a concept that refers to the way in which a society groups different people into stratas, or layers, based on wealth, power, and social status. The Great Gatsby is an accomplished piece of social commentary, showing American life in the Roaring Twenties. The strong economy that arose in the 1920s created an environment for many influential changes in the day-to-day social life of Americans, reflected in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald organized†¦show more content†¦The narrator, Nick Carraway tells the reader from the outset of the book that he is done with the way society, and in particular the upper class behaves. When he came back from visiting in the East Egg, he says he â€Å"wanted the world to be in uni form (Fitzgerald, 2)†. It is apparent, from the beginning that class difference will play a large role in how the book transpires, and so it does. Daisy, Tom, and a friend of theirs, Jordan Baker, are at the top of the novel’s social empire. Their families have had money for years, and for that reason, they are the Old Money. As exposed in the novel, they spend their ‘old money’ very freely and tend to entertain themselves with parties, etc. With high class, they choose their acquaintances based upon that as well. The social differentiation shown here is that they did not care how much money people in the 1920s (like Gatsby) had in their pockets. It was where and how they got the money, that mattered to these elites. Throughout the novel, Jay Gatsby strives to reassure Daisy that he has more wealth than when they first fell in love. Moving next to Nick, Daisy’s cousin, Gatsby invests in his house to make it magnificent, all for her welcoming. Gatsby’s hope to win Daisy’s love had changed course when Daisy figured out that he had not been born into money. Figuring out that James Gatz did not attend Oxford and had to work (bootlegging) for his money, was enough for Daisy and Tom to not attend Gatsby’s funeral in theShow MoreRelatedsparknotes vs cliffnotes830 Words   |  4 Pagesranging from overall plot summaries and character analysis, but Sparknotes goes more into the literary aspect of the book, while cliffnotes focuses more on the character and his motives. In analyzing Jay Gatsby, Cliffnotes focuses much more on Gatsby himself and his underlying motives to his character, like â€Å"In assessing Gatsby, one must examine his blind pursuit of Daisy.† (Cliffnotes). Sparknotes focuses not only on the overall character of Jay Gatsby, but also analyzes how his character compares withRead MoreLiterary Analysis Of The Great Gatsby1787 Words   |  8 PagesThe Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is hailed as masterpiece of American fictions of its time. It is noted for the remarkable way its author captures a cross-section of American society during the 1920 s. The author, F. Scott Fitzgerald offers up a commentary on the American society of which he was a part. He successfully encapsulates the mood of a generation during a politically and socially crucial and chaotic period of American history. In fact, The Great Gatsby is a brilliant piece of EnglishRead MoreExploring The Destruction Of True Love2134 Words   |  9 Pagescapitalist society: A Marxist Approach to â€Å"The Great Gatsby† Love can be defined as honesty, trust and respect; it occurs when two people touch each other s soul. Every series, every story and every movie speaks about how two people fall in love and live happily ever after. All stories come to that same conclusion but what happens when two people don’t belong to the same social class. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a story about Jay Gatsby, a man who is part of the working class that