The End...

I hate to start this blog off on a depressing note, but when I think about relating what we’ve discussed in class to my work (as a grad student, and as someone who evaluates student teachers), I can’t help but feel like the philosophers (and we as educators) have imagined these great educational ideals that all but fall apart in practice.

            But maybe I shouldn’t always compare the reality to the ideal.  Public schools will never be perfect; that’s certain for as long as the societies surrounding them remain imperfect.  But inasmuch as working towards those goals can lead to some improvement, it helps to keep the “ideal” in mind, right? 

            I evaluate six teachers in five different schools across the city.  Four of those teachers work in alternative charter schools.  The students in those schools have either 1) been released from jail or juvenile detention centers and are trying to gain credits toward graduation, 2) been expelled from CPS, 3) left school because they have become pregnant or severely ill or 4) some combination of the above.  Of the other two teachers, one teaches in a CPS high school with a 7^th and 8^th grade academic center, and one is teaching in a private Catholic high school. 

            My favorite classes to sit in on are the ones in the alternative schools, and it’s been that way since the beginning of the semester.  I’ve found the administration and staff to be the most knowledgeable and accommodating, the teachers, though vastly underpaid, seem to be the most creative and diligent, and the students are exactly like high school students everywhere: confused, bright, noisy, curious, excitable, bored, in need of attention, violent at times and really, really funny. I think what makes those classrooms so comfortable for me is how honest they are. Things are out in the open.  The students and teachers and staff are, for the most part, aware of each others’ backgrounds.  They know who just got out of jail last week, who is most likely to have the least support at home because they are raising themselves, and who can only read at a grammar school level because they didn’t attend school for years at a time.  And these things are addressed fairly openly, along with assignments and academic progress.  The classes are small, progress is measured as independently as possible, and I have seen very few lessons that the students weren’t engaged in.  And high school students can be a tough crowd!

            I don’t want to romanticize it, but I see way more of what we’ve been discussing in the past few weeks in these classrooms than I do in the standard public high school.  And for the most part, it’s not the teachers’ “fault”; they do what they can, and they’re being regulated down to the minute.  In a 46-minute period, they only teach for about 20.  They have 30+ kids in their classes, more than half have IEPs (though it’s extremely unclear exactly how many of those students truly have disabilities; many seem to be inappropriately diagnosed), and just last week, one of my teachers had to “re”-teach her seniors nouns, pronouns and adjectives.  Almost none of her students could pass a quiz on them.  It’s hard to think about an interdisciplinary curriculum that would have life experience at its center when 18-year-olds can’t explain what a noun is…although a curriculum like that in that classroom would probably make the most difference…

…And as I’ve had conversations with the teachers in the different schools, and as I’ve experienced this class, I’m more and more convinced that we have many of the things we need to give students a great education, we’ve just decided that we don’t really think they deserve it.  But the funny thing is, I’ve been allowed to see these spaces where the most forgotten of the forgotten kids go to learn, and because it’s kind of “off the radar”, they have in their classrooms things that we would want for all of our kids: really dedicated, knowledgeable teachers, a safe environment, a challenging, relevant curriculum, class sizes no larger than 15 students, support staff, college transition counselors, the “works”.  I think, as a society, we’ve just convinced ourselves that these kids aren’t going to “make it” anyway, so if a few of them get to have these resources for a year or so while they’re in alternative school, that’s fine.  But giving them all of this from day one? Nonsense.  If they want a really education, they should just get expelled so they can go to alternative school.  That, or miraculously become really, really rich.

So not only did I start on a depressing note, I guess I’m ending on one too.  I think what I’m trying to say is that while each philosopher illuminated some themes that we need to grapple with (and no doubt we will for a long time), what these readings have done is given us a foundation upon which to build and organize our ideas and perspectives.  But in terms of concrete ideas on what could make public education “better”? I think these readings, especially the Whitehead and Dewey selections, remind us that we do have insight into what should be happening in classrooms, what we still need to cultivate is the will to make it happen.

Reflections

At this point in the philosophy of education journey, I definitely have more questions than I have answers.  While I feel like I understand the backgrounds of some thinkers better, and class discussion has definitely helped me contextualize the readings, I’m not sure how to connect the knowledge I’ve gained with my analysis of education policy.  But this doesn’t mean that the class wasn’t a good one, in fact, I think the opposite.  I’m just thinking more deeply about how to apply this information to the policies that govern what happens in schools and school system, and as I do that I seem to stumble upon more questions…

            What I’ve come to understand is that some of the readings act as a magnifying glass as much as they do a prescription of how to “run” schools. By that I mean that trying to understand our experiences in schools through the lenses of these readings definitely made me more aware of the strengths and weakness in classrooms that I’ve been in, and classrooms in general.  More than give ideas about the way school should work, the pieces we read made it easier to understand the larger questions that need to constantly be asked of/about public schools: Who is this place for? What is this place for? Who is being included in and excluded from learning experiences? What specific subjects are we teaching and why? How are teaching these subjects? How are we measuring success?

            Of course, those questions are answered differently at each school, and sometimes they’re answered differently inside each classroom.  But I think shying away from those questions because they beget a wide range of answers is what gets us in the worst predicaments in schools. We’re always looking for the one problem that needs to be fixed, and we assume that it is as easy to fix as it is to identify, so each decade we “fix” something different thinking it will be the last time.  If there’s anything that the Cahn compilation has taught us, however, is that change is constantly occurring, There are very few, if any, simple, swift solutions. And even if there were more, each solution has to be sustainable and relevant.  When it ceases to be either of those, it’s not really a solution anymore.  So as we move forward, I think we should link this knowledge to policy in ways that make it clear that we’re thinking about the current generations and future ones, the current society and future society, and what we want those to look like.

Dewey's Democracy and Education (1)

            In the “School as Special Environment” section, Dewey begins to move beyond training and socialization to discuss what “office” the school holds that makes it important in and of itself. He writes,

“…our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible structures.  Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such matters.”

            This quote is so important because it makes clear that idea school not only has a specific function beyond training young people to exhibit behaviors that will make them socially acceptable, or even preparing for the roles they will have in their own communities and nations, it exists because without it, we cannot help people make sense of the world outside their immediate communities.  There are people and systems whose actions affect ours, and vice versa, and schools are the formal institution whose job it is to teach people how that happens.  I think we forget that all too often, and/or we move the “making sense of the world” part of education to colleges and universities, leaving large groups of people out of the process.  He continues,     

“…it is the business of the school environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy features of the existing environment from the influence upon mental habitudes.  It establishes a purified medium of action…As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society.  The school is its chief agency for the accomplishment of this end”

            Dewey opened Democracy and Education with a discussion of human reproduction, and here he begins to discuss social reproduction, and the role the school has in shaping it.  Whereas previous thinkers we’ve looked at have talked about reason and its relation to morality, and the idea of humans becoming more moral with each generation if education is executed properly, I feel like Dewey articulates these ideas in a way that incorporates agency in a way other thinkers hadn’t.  For him, education and communication don’t exist in a vacuum.  So even as we become better thinkers or “reasoners”, the school has to make choices about what past human achievements are worth teaching in order to help create a better society. Just knowing things, or being able to reason, doesn’t make humans better over time. Dewey then goes on to say,

            “In the third place, it is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with the broader environment.  Such words as “society” and “community” are likely to be misleading, for they have the tendency to make us think that there is a single thing corresponding to the single word.”

            Humans, according to this passage, are equally limited in their ability to know about the world outside of their immediate society, no matter what social group their born into.  I know this passage can be used to argue for the importance of education because of its ability to help people gain better class positions.  But for me it’s a great reminder that any position in society is limited if it remains connected from the greater world. Furthermore, it reminds me to resist the idea that there is only one way to understand community and society, rather there are communities and societies, all acting upon and reacting to each other, making education much more complex, but also that much more necessary if you agree with Dewey’s idea of the purpose of schools.

Whitehead's Aims of Education

Whitehead, in The Aims of Education, posits that the main problem with education is that students receive far too many inert ideas during the course of their schooling.  Inert ideas are pieces of information that are given to students without any context, and they remain disconnected from other ideas because they are not used or tested.  Because this is the dominant pedagogy, students become “a disheartened crowd of young folk, inoculated against any outbreak of intellectual zeal.”

Whitehead is writing mostly about education that takes place after age 16, what we would think of a secondary and higher education.  He believes that training, which takes place until age 12, is mainly done in the home, by mothers.  In order for education to actually mean something, that is, for students to learn more than inert ideas, there is a process of learning that must take place for each idea or subject matter.  In addition to that process, people must realize that teaching itself is a craft that can’t be done by anyone, and can’t be measured in the objective manner that many propose.  A teacher has to be skilled to guide students through the educational process, and the way student learning is evaluated can’t be governed by sweeping generalizations about what students should be exposed to.  I think the paragraph on page 264 that begins with “The best procedure…” resonates today, as the dominant thinking about education today is that students’ progress can be measured objectively, as if their minds are “dead matter.”

The process, or rhythm of education, should, in Whitehead’s view, begin with the romance stage.  In this stage, the student’s interest is sparked in a subject or idea. The teacher must be careful at this stage not to enforce too much discipline around learning facts about the subject because that can “kill” the curiosity that the student has.  At the same time, however, the teacher has to be a skillful guide so that the student comes to the realization that there is so much more to learn about their interest.  The next stage is the precision stage, in which the student receives concrete knowledge about the subject, and the skills necessary to apply their knowledge in the final stage. The generalization stage is the one in which a student can apply the skill they learned in the precision stage to the larger world.  These stages together make knowledge useful and applicable in the world, which is something that Whitehead sees little of.  When experienced fully, the stages also allow the student to retain the sense of wonder they have about the world and their intellectual growth isn’t stunted.

Whitehead notes that it is possible for the student to move through all stages in one subject but not in others, meaning that meaningful knowledge can be developed in one subject, but be stunted in another.  I could see that happening a lot with students at the high school and college level, because they have so many different teachers and professors, and depending on how the teacher approaches the subject, and how they handle discipline, that romance stage could either be encouraged or stifled.  From what I understand, a student has to be intrigued by a subject, and that initial intrigue is what can set the process in motion.  But I’m wondering must the student discover the subject themselves, or can it be something that is introduced by the teacher as long as that teacher lets the curiosity develop and lead to questions which move into the precision stage?