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Citizen Jimserac Citizen Jimserac is offline
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Default $4 dollar gas and its effects on metalworking

On Apr 23, 10:25 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"CitizenJimserac" wrote in message

...
On Apr 22, 7:14 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:



"CitizenJimserac" wrote in message


...


snip


Never mind me, I'm just one from many. My experiences are hardly
definitive and you've attended far more schools at all levels than
I ever did. But that very fact probably saved you from its
full effect. Besides, teachers are for the most part good
and well intentioned and they resent the system as much
as everyone else. Read Gatto's book, it's all there - the smuggled
in "guidelines" and "standards" about what our students
would or would not learn, could or could not learn,
should or should not learn and the role of "socialization"
(remember what was then called "social studies").


I will put the book on my list and try to get to it. I've been catching up
lately. d8-)


I took some education courses at Rhode Island College
in the late 1960's and I recall my astonishment at the
Maoist like intensity with which the views of Jean Jaques Rousseau,
Dewey and Horace Mann were propounded as if they were
the be all and end all of educational philosophies.


CitizenJimserac


The late '60s was a very strange time. I was in college then, too, and I
can
imagine there were plenty of rabid ideologues in teacher's education, as
there were in many other fields. But those three were important thinkers
who
had a powerful effect upon education, and, to some extent, upon politics..
As
historical figures and original thinkers they were all important; you
can't
teach the history of education, or understand how we got where we are,
without a serious study of their lives and ideas. I'd need to know the
context in which they were being taught to appreciate your judgment in
this
case.


When education was extended to the general population, as someone else
commented in this thread, the question arose about what they were to be
educated *for*. Until that time education was for the elite, the future
leaders in government, business, religion, the professions, and so on. It
wasn't until our lifetimes that the general socialization objective came
under scrutiny.


So, here we are in 2008. What would you have kids learn today? What is it
that you think the schools are failing to teach? And what, specifically,
would you remove from the current curriculum?


--
Ed Huntress


Listen to what Gatto says:
(from "The Underground History of American Education"
by John Taylor Gatto,
"By the late 1960s I had exhausted my imagination
inside the conventional classroom when all of a
sudden a period of phenomenal turbulence descended
upon urban schoolteaching everywhere. I’ll tell
you more about this in a while, but for the moment,
suffice it to say that supervisory personnel
were torn loose from their moorings, superintendents,
principals and all the rest flung to the wolves
by those who actually direct American schooling.

In this dark time, local management cowered.
During one three-year stretch I can remember,
we had four principals and three superintendents.
The net effect of this ideological bombardment,
which lasted about five years in its most
visible manifestation, was to utterly destroy
the utility of urban schools. From my own
perspective all this was a godsend. Surveillance
of teachers and administrative routines lost
their bite as school administrators scurried
like rats to escape the wrath of their unseen
masters..."

Gatto goes on to describe how the school district
later tried to get rid of him by secretly canceling
his teaching license while he was on sick
leave and and they sent the legally required notice
to an address that he
had not lived at for 22 years. After several
hearings in which the required sick leave papers
that he filed had vanished, Gatto found a payroll
secretary who verified that he had filed
the proper papers and that people had come to her
office and made an effort to locate and remove
those papers. Gatto was eventually reinstated
and made teacher of the year two years later.

It was this battle with those cynical administrators
that taught Gatto how easily the impersonal
public school monster could be backed up
in the face of opposition that showed
any hint at all of exposing the entire sham.

Again in your post you have focused on the family
and on the student rather than on this administrative
structure, filled with well meaning people, which
seems to enact what a few money controlling agencies,
foundations and government offices desire rather
than act for the good of the students and their futures.

CitizenJimserac

=============================================

But what about the question of what is being taught, or should be taught,
and what should not be taught? Gatto is complaining about the
administration. How about the education?

--
Ed Huntress


He has PLENTY to say on the subject of curricula, and in depth
and in detail. Read the book!

CJ