Question one:
In my opinion the relationship between education and success is the strong bond they have the opportunity to hold together, depending on which path you take. The bond these two topics share are very controversial in today’s society. Some say you can only achieve success with a background in education and schooling but some also say they don’t need school to be successful. The idea of education is different for everyone according to Ta-Nehisi stated “ To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant always packing an extra number two pencil and working quietly” (Coates 93). To Coates, school and him didn’t get along that well at first but he pointed out the relationship between failing in school as well as how race and class played into it. He pointed out “Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail” (Coastes 93). This just shows that the school and today’s society is failing not the students.
Question three:
To me after reading Coates essay the solution he used to fix education was the influence of a dream and the support of an outside source that gave him motivation. He states “ …that this fear was connected to this dream out there…” “(Coates 84). Later on in the essay, Coates went into how a grandmother gave him this simple knowledge of how to become a man and a basic understanding of education, this was his outside source of motivation. It states “ Your grandmother taught me how to read at the age of four. She also taught me how to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as means as investigation” (Coates 94). Coates solutions relates to what I do in class because I use these two solutions everyday. I use my dream of making it big and getting a good job after college as a motivation to go to class everyday. I also have outside support and motivation from my friends and family back home that pushed me to do better in my academics.
