A mom with a purpose

stoweboyd:

A classic futurist scenario-based extrapolation of current trends across the event horizon, but it doesn’t really compel. Micheal Lee spins three scenarios, based on factors in the footnotes, but it’s all so top-down and disconnected to outside influences:

Michael Lee, Too Big to Succeed?…

polygonal-lasso:

zilfworks:

“The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty.”

That quote was inscribed in stone over the front door of my high school (and, ever since, on my brain).  I learned later that the school’s architect borrowed it (circa 1910) from the Boston Public Library, where it’s credited to the library’s Board of Trustees.

Ironically, my high school was torn down in the late 1980s, just about the time all the nonsense that’s eating at the foundations of public education today was getting started.

Brought to mind today by a post on Diane Ravitch’s blog discussing why we need public education.  It’s not about jobs or global competition. It’s about freedom and democracy.

Well, two things:

1. The foundation of the American education system really wasn’t wholly about freedom and democracy. Not that I was alive then, but the literature from that time suggests that the goal for education was social cohesion and, in a sense, social control. Local instruction, scaled up, started as a way to make sure people could benefit from the lessons of holy scripture. As a whole system, on the other hand, American education learned lessons from Prussia and the Netherlands, where the goal was more to put a focus on morals (even casting aside literacy goals) as well as to, in a sense, protect children from the seemingly fractious effects of religious diversity (in other words, to protect kids from the education that their parents choose).
2. As we have seen throughout history, the purpose of education has changed. And people are different. Is it wrong for a parent to say that the job of the education system is to prepare their children to get a job? Is it wrong for a President to hope that the education system will protect the economy via global competition? I don’t really have answers to that, but I think all of those arguments are defensible in their own way.

I never really buy arguments for protecting the foundations of institutions, since societies change. And I think the last, overriding question for me when I consider this is the issue of who’s job or right it is to define what education is to accomplish. 

Thoughts?

(via adventuresinlearning)

During his year in the classroom, Danza dealt with the tough challenges so many teachers face: Over 60 percent of Northeast’s majority minority student population are economically disadvantaged and the year Danza taught only 58 percent of the school’s eleventh graders scored proficient in English on the state test. Danza also had to figure out what to do when half of his class failed their first quiz, when students skipped class, got into fights, and got busted for cheating.

“The question I still wrestle with” writes Danza in an op-ed for USA Today, “is ‘in the midst of a tough economy and continuous budget cutting, how do we send a message to students that being in school and making the most of their time there is important?’” Danza says his experience taught him that “teachers have no problem being held accountable by parents. In fact, they crave parent involvement.”

What teachers need parents to do, says Danza, is “persuade their sons and daughters to take part in their own education.” That can’t happen, though, if parents don’t get involved. “There were evenings when, as an English teacher hosting an open house for parents, I stood mostly alone,” says Danza. And, although he heard plenty about how teachers need to engage students, “kids have to understand that it’s their responsibility to do well—no matter who their teacher is or the quality of their school.”

(via adventuresinlearning)