“When he said this, I thought, adults should be so lucky, that adolescents wait for us to name the words dropping out, or sex, for them to do it.” (Fine 18)

This line really stuck out to me because you rarely have to explicitly spell something out for students for them to pick up on it. No matter how hard educators might try to repress talk of sex, dropping out, and racism if these acts are being perpetuated in the student’s environment and community, they will eventually end up knowing all there is to know about it.

I believe it’s unhealthy for educators to repress talk of such fundamentally important topics – especially to low-income students because in doing so they are essentially erasing the experiences and history of the student. For example, with the problem of racism, it has still yet to be terminated and there are rampant cases of systematic racism in the United States but by gift-wrapping the problem of racism and proclaiming that is over is perpetuating the wrong idea. These social issues should be openly discussed and the students most affected by such issues should be well informed about these things so they can use it to fight back and guard themselves against it. By silencing the voices of these students and their experiences, educators are just continuing the vicious cycle of misinformed dropouts and a hatred for the institution of education.