Upperclass Education Essay -- essays research papers fc

Land Of The Free, Home Of The Upper Class   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.† (Lazarus) This incredible, sentimental homage to the American dream brings many to ask, what a wonderful concept- but is this truly the case? Is America truly a land of opportunity and dreams realized, or is it more so a case of realizing we have been dreaming? In a country where image is made and sold like bread in a bakery, it is no wonder the idea of a land of opportunity still exists- it smells so good. In theory, a land of opportunity and self-motivation would be a real chance at success and pure determination and hard work could get a man wherever he desires to be. However, reality poses quite a different story. Everyday hardworking families struggle to get by on food stamps and minimum wage. If theories of equal opportunity held true, ev ery single parent working multiple jobs for their children would be able to send their kids to good schools and not need to worry about how to pay for a trip to dentist or a doctor’s check-up. And while it is easy to point fingers at the poor and say that its all their fault because of the decisions they’ve made or as luck would have it, a gray area develops when taking a look at the working class and realizing that there are boundaries in place that try to keep people in their positions of powerlessness. One of these boundaries is class through education. Through background, cost, and strategic tokenism, the American society has bordered out the same people it claims to embrace.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  First of all, one may point out the arbitrary nature of class. While ideally most people would like to see a country of hard work and payoff, the fact of the matter is that from the moment we are born, before any chance to prove oneself, we are placed into a category that has either great advantages or vast disadvantages. The elite are nearly always born that way, just as those in poverty. Once a child is born into their status, where they live has major impact on how their life will pan out. For most of Middle America suburbs comprised of housing developments and apartment complexes put children into mediocre public schools with mi... ...emselves.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Clearly, the solution to this situation is far more complicated than most people like to admit and in no single action will we find a remedy for it. The inequalities in place must first and foremost be recognized and acknowledged for any sort of change to come about. We can no longer â€Å"accept it as inevitable, [and] something we just have to live with.† (Langston 127) Leveling the playing field does not make a person a socialist or jeopardize upper class status; in fact, chances are that more upward movement would benefit the economy as a whole and not just a single class of people. It is about time that instead of passively accepting the inequalities at hand that something ought to be done about them, one step at a time. After all, we want to live up to the lady who claims to lift her lamp beside the golden door to let people use their opportunities if they so choose. Bibliography Domhoff, G. William. Mapping The Social Landscape, Susan J. Ferguson. McGraw-Hill 2005. Page 290 Langston, Donna. â€Å"Tired Of Playing Monopoly,† Race, Class, and Gender. Wadsworth Publishing Company 1998. Pages 127-130 Lazarus, Emma. â€Å"The New Colossus† 1883

Marketing $100 Laptop

Mr. Negroponte wanted to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a low cost laptop. This laptop will have educational software to provide children with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities. OLPC provides an interesting vantage point from which to examine the dynamics between non-profit and for-profit competitors because of the rapid development of the low-cost laptop market. OLPC was undoubtedly the innovator in this category of low-cost laptops with their â€Å"$100 laptop† concept. However, now that for-profit companies have entered the market and released a slew of similar products, OLPC must find ways to maintain its competitive advantage. OLPC was facing some marketing challenges and some the non-marketing challenges. The $100 price for the laptops is to be achieved by operating with no profit, cutting all unnecessary frills including marketing campaigns and assembling large quantities of computers. Negroponte estimated the program will launch with a distribution of at least 5 million computers, and said he hopes to increase that number to 100 million by the second year. He predicted that as the laptop design improves, the per-unit price will go down. Marketing Challenges: †¢ Marketing a low-cost, lightweight laptop seemed contradictory to recent products that are lightweight and ultra-thin that were typically more expensive and harder to manufacture. †¢ Most children using $100 laptop would not have ready access to electricity. †¢ Consumers criticizing OLPC for discounting the value of teacher training and curriculum development using the device. †¢ Governments opting out to put its resources toward traditional method of education. †¢ Prices for the OLPC don’t seem to stay at $100 causing different price floats. †¢ Competition like Intel(for profit companies) launching its own cheaper laptop targeting developing nations as well. Offering enhanced capabilities and the ability to run version of Linux or Window XP 3. Analysis: Differentiation: Price and Technology OLPC should differentiate its product, the XO, from direct competitors such as Intel’s Classmate PC and indirect competitors in the netbook category such as Dell Mini product lines. Differentiation must be visible on three distinct levels; price, technology, and brand. Price: OLPC is currently the cost-leader in this category. The Intel Classmate PC, which is OLPC’s most direct competitor, is currently priced at $285. The OLPC’s XO is priced at $175. Since both OLPC and its competitors are serving government education programs, cost will be extremely important as a number of nations are creating bidding wars for purchasing contracts. Even though OLPC is the lowest cost offering at this point, maintaining this price advantage will become increasingly difficult as competition in the market for low-cost laptops heats up. OLPC overcame some of the challenges by keeping laptop at low-cost by outsourcing the major design work and key part of the operating systems to different countries. Technology and Innovation: OLPC had a first-mover advantage in this market as its XO offering was perhaps the first entrant into the affordable netbook category. OLPC is specialized for its market of children ages 6-12. The design and child-friendly operating system is very unique. The unique connectivity is important for rural areas with sparse communications infrastructure. The XO is built for ultimate adaptability. Even its power sources can be diversified. OLPC has done an admirable job differentiating its product from its competitors through its innovative technologies and education-specific software and hardware. Competitive Strategy: Though OLPC is a leader on price and feature set, sustaining this advantage will be extremely difficult when facing competition from the largest computer companies in the world. Thus to keep its top position, it must leverage its advantages as a non-profit organization. OLPC must create value from its non-profit status to build reputation and trust. As a non-profit, OLPC can build goodwill in ways that for-profit companies are not able. Also being a non-profit enables OLPC to finance and maintain pricing schemes that are different than the competition. In terms of cost savings, OLPC has the advantage that many companies are eager to produce components for the OLPC. For example, Microsoft has gone out of its way to create a version of Windows to run on the OLPC. This is a cost savings that competitive firms are unable to match. To exploit this advantage further, OLPC could even attract advertisement agency to advertise on their PCs to further lower the cost of each machine.

Distinguishing Fantasy from Reality Comparison Essay...

Don DeLillo’s book, White Noise, tells the story of Jack Gladney and his family. Throughout the book, Jack takes on a professional, fictional persona resembling that of Hitler, being the Chairman of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill (DeLillo 4). Jack turns his professional persona into this fictional character, something he could transform himself into, as if he was filling a Hitler mold. Jack relies on this Hitler-esque persona to sustain his own personal identity and self-worth, although in his mind, this fake persona is only subsidiary to his own personality. Jack struggles with ascertaining the importance of himself as compared to the importance of his own made-up persona and this notion of fabricated reality becoming more†¦show more content†¦Jack’s two identities and his using his fake persona to bolster his own identity can be compared with the movie Fight Club. In the film, Edward Norton plays the narrator of the movie, an unnamed, insomniac off ice worker. He unknowingly creates a second persona, Tyler Durden, and he sees Tyler as a completely separate person. Throughout the movie, Norton slowly begins to transform his dull, meek life to mirror that of Tyler’s, although he does not yet see that he is in fact Tyler. The idea presented by The Most Photographed Barn in America is presented in Fight Club when Norton states, â€Å"Everything’s a copy of a copy of a copy† (Fincher). Norton’s character lives a very dull, monotone life. Everything from his speech, his work, and his living conditions are very bland and boring. When he begins attending support groups to validate his own personal pains by using the pain of others as a crutch, he forms a hatred for Marla Singer because her lie reflected his own lie of not actually having something wrong with him as everyone else in the various support groups. After he develops an addiction to support groups, he states that â€Å"If I didn’t say anyt hing, people always assumed the worst† (Fincher). 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