I tried to keep it short and to the point...

Being born to two college graduate parents, who experienced highschool and college during the late 60's and 70's has placed me in interesting territory as far as education theory is concerned. While the total college experience between my father and mother totals over 20 years of attendance and 2 Master's Degrees in different fields, my parents each are born from "working class" families. My father is the son of a local german-american family that has lived in Wisconsin for generations, my grandfather worked as a carpenter and later at a Hardware store until he was paralyzed by strokes. My grandmother on the same side is a first generation Danish immigrant who came through Ellis island in the late 40's, and worked as a School Secretary for the majority of her adult life. On my Mother's side she is an Eisenhower High School graduate from New Berlin, Wisconsin the youngest of a family of four. Her mother was a school teacher for the majority of her working life, and interestingly enough is a female graduate of UWMilwaukee herself in an era where women were not expected to attain higher education. My grandfather on this side was the owner of a Camera store, not necessarily the purebred aesthetic-cultural stock as presented in Kosut's text. The criticism I hope to insight by combining the ideas, vocabulary and theories of these academic writings, is that in victimizing the working class or underprivileged students and developing theories of primary discursive inadequacy, I feel academics are only increasing the ideological divide between those who are taught and those who learn. I also wish to tackle the common misconception of grouping the ideologies of "working class" and "uneducated" this false attribution was something that stuck out like a sore thumb as I completed each reading.

Delpit

I felt that reading Delpit's essay has significantly effected my understanding of discursive theories limits. While I agree with the idea of discourse as a specific collection of ideas and analytical strategies relating to a certain academic field, I feel that Discourse be it primary or secondary is too broad a generalization of behaviors, environment and specific personalities to be held as a valid theory. The conceptualization of "at-risk" youth being of another realm of understanding and learning is a degrading inference in my opinion.