Final Thoughts

As the semester comes to an end and I come to the end of Shapiro's Losing Heart, I just wanted to share a few final thoughts...

Although there are two main themes in the book, I identified more with the broader social crisis, where material prosperity overshadows spiritual well-being. While I do think the other theme, educational reform, is truly important, the spirituality aspect really fits in with my school counseling path. In the final chapter, Shapiro writes, "There is, today, an extraordinary disconnection between the education we offer young people, and the needs that must be addressed to cope with the world within which they are growing up. This disconnection (chasm is probably a more appropriate term) makes much of what passes for education a strangely out of touch experiences for youngsters- one that at best bores, and at worst draws contempt or cynicism" (p.181).

He continues to discuss that the "real curriculum" of children's lives is their subjection to the constant influence of a culture that turns every aspect of life into a commodity- something that can be bought and sold. Therefore, our culture, so focused on consumption, encourages an obsessive focus on the self. This materialistic focus takes away from the quest for spiritual, moral and social meaning. I can see how this all factors into a child's self-concept and self-worth.

Another part of the book that I identified with was when Shapiro discussed schooling and the hidden curriculum. "Most schooling in the U.S.," he writes, "teaches young people little about thinking critically about their world. The classroom is mainly a place where kids, in order to succeed, learn about finding the 'right' answers to the teachers' questions, and to respond successfully to their tests and assignments. It is, perhaps, the central lesson of the hidden curriculum" (p.96). This concept really ft into our class discussions and my own views regarding curriculum.

Although I never really thought about education or even thought about my views regarding education, I'm appreciative of this class and the way it has opened my mind to thinking about thinking. Like I mentioned in my P.O.E., I am still unsure of my exact philosophy and I think that is OK. What I take from this book and this class is not to change my own views and values, but to just start thinking about them.

Question #1

Dead Prez- They Schools

I'm not a very good rapper, but if I was Stic-man or M1 from Dead Prez then I might write this song instead of an essay for my Philosophy of Education project. Before you listen to this song please be warned that it is laced with cuss words and general "bad" language, including racial epithets. I still think it is a very very good song, one which has influenced my ideas about public education immensely and probably kept me from going in to teaching for a couple of years.

Again: Adults only, not for sensitive ears!

A few minor tweaks

I've updated a bunch of the posts to include Labels for the book/author that the post discusses. When you're writing new posts, you can add tags in the bottom of the edit window. Just click 'Show all' and click to select any Labels you want to add (you can also write in your own, separated by commas).

Also, in the sidebar, you should see a list of labels for each of our books. Clicking on a title will allow you to sort out and view just the posts that have that label.

I'm hoping this may help with organizing the conversation. If anyone has other ideas for improving things here, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

As always, hit me up with questions if you have them.

My first impression on Shame of the Nation

I'm digging into Shame of the Nation and will hopefully be able to post a follow up to this, as well as start conversing with the other readers, very soon. For right now, I'm overdue on some initial impressions.

My first impression, to be honest, was that of being a bit overwhelmed by all of the individual school statistics that Kozal tosses out. Over and over and over he tells us of schools with nearly one hundred percent black and hispanic populations, in cities all over the country, in all kinds of neighborhoods. At first, they start to run together, but then they start to come into focus as a nationwide epidemic of segregation. And then you can start seeing the patterns.

Kozal frames a lot of this in opposition to the Brown v. Board decision which, effectively, ended segregation in our public schools. But the patterns today show differently. And the impression I get from Kozal so far, which I'm interested to see how it pans out through the rest of the book, is that the current problems with segregation in schools is a new type of problem from what B v. B addressed: some sort of impersonal, unconscious, systematic issue. That, perhaps more problematic than explicit racism or even the 'separate but equal' treatment of Plessy v. Ferguson, is trusting that the issue does not exist anymore and 'letting the market decide,' as it were.

Kozal's intimate tone throughout gives the book a nice, personal feel. He relates his prior experiences as a teacher in poor, mostly minority schools and throughout he provides anecdotes about the children he has encountered and spoken with throughout his research. He strikes a nice balance between observation and research that, so far, makes for a good read, although I can already feel myself looking for deeper analysis and, to be frank, someone to blame and a ready solution. I suppose the first person narration confuses part of me into looking for Kozal's narrative of 'how I overcame the issue,' even though I know it's not going to be there.

What I am looking forward to is how Kozal further sorts out the complexity of the segregation issue and, hopefully, provides a framework for understanding that can be used by those of us looking to transform our 'best intentions' into 'meaningful action.'

Shame of the Nation

As I am continuing to read Kozol's Shame of the Nation I am becoming more and more disheartened. With each chapter that I read I am faced with horrendous stories that if it were not for this class I would not believe. Most Americans, myself included, live in this bubble where we believe conditions such as those mentioned by Kozol could not exist in our schools; these types of conditions could only exist in third world countries. While I was aware of some of the issues facing our public school, I never knew the extent of them. Kozol, I believe, does a wonderful job in capturing the true stories of the students who have to deal with these conditions on a daily basis.

Sadly to say, however, the physical conditions are not the students biggest set backs in these schools. The biggest setback for these students are the leaders who view them as assembly line workers and robots. On pg. 98 Kozol quotes a head of a Chicago school saying "these robots are going to producing taxes", I find it absolutely dehumanizing to view these children are mindless robots trained to make money for the government. With this mindset we are limiting the children to only a few possibilities; we are telling them they are only good enough for one type of work. This type of mindset kills the dreams and self-confidence of these students; a child can only hear "you are not good enough, you wont amount to anything" so many times before they start to believe it. Kozol paints us a very grim picture of what our education system is doing to most of the children.

One criticism of Kozol's book so far is that it seems to be very repetitive. I am half way done with the book and I feel that I have read the same story over and over again. While I know it is important to show that each school that he visited had the same problems, I feel that time would have been better spent if he actually talked more about ways to fix these problems. Hopefully the next half of the book will focus more on the solutions instead of the problems.

A shift, perhaps...

Spoiler alert? Just kidding, not really. I’m near the end of Shame of the Nation, and Kozol shares with us some bits and pieces that suggest that perhaps people are starting to see the ugly truth about the accountability/standardization movement. Keep in mind the book came out five years ago, so we could start looking for more examples that things have perhaps started to shift in a better direction; like Kozol said on p. 258 the movement comes first and litigation, or in some situations policy change, comes after. So despite Obama’s backing of some of the key NCLB rhetoric and principles, maybe things are changing (and at least he sees the importance in expanding Head Start and moving away from punishing underperforming schools). From page 304:

At P.S. 65, there have been changes too. A new principal has been appointed. A new curriculum is now in use. In recent visits to the school, I noted that the hand-held timers and the scripted lesson plans were gone. Writings by children, as the children wrote them, were displayed in corridors and on the classroom walls.

If some have started to realize that buzzword-driven education, saluting and hand gestures in class, and scripted lesson plans are not the way to go, that is an improvement but it doesn’t get us very far with the bigger, harder to solve problems. Segregation is still what drives separate and almost certainly, almost always unequal educational opportunity. Without addressing this we are never more than halfway there. The progressive funding models I mentioned in my first post are one logical way to help address unequal and unjust situations, and this needs to happen far more than it does, but that gets us to what, 75%? A lowly C!

I don’t mean to minimize the importance of better funding and a more real, caring, and meaningful kind of teaching. You can tell that Kozol cares about the teacher/student relationship and the principal/teacher relationship. He also cares about recess, play, carving pumpkins just for fun, and any other way that lets a kid be a kid. Far from taking away from test-drill learning (or any kind of learning), these are things that support learning and child socialization. Coming from the counseling angle, this is crucial to me and I’m glad Kozol takes time to discuss it.