Payments, Programs, and Elbow Grease
November 2nd, 2009 |
Susan Engel, psychologist and educational administrator, has her take on the cesspool of American education in yesterday’s NYT:
If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.
Her argument–which, to be fair, includes some good ideas–is typical of the public discourse regarding education. Economics, pedagogy, and commitment are all that matter. If we attack those deficiencies with our American can-do spirit, by golly, our kids will actually start to learn something.
There are few public debates in which I wish sociologists had a more prominent voice than education. Yes, we all know the American system is failing. But the public discourse completely neglects several important questions that critical sociology has addressed in detail over the past thirty years.
- Why do we continue to embrace a nineteenth century assembly-line method of education that has been completely belied by research into individual learning styles?
- If part of the function of education is to create well-adjusted adults, why do we segregate youths from the adult world by curtailing civil liberties and property rights? Why do we warehouse them in separate institutions in which they are forced to spend far more time with their peers (hardly a model of competent adulthood) than adults?
- Why do we not acknowledge that the hidden curriculum of norms and values is just as consequential as the pedagogical curriculum? Why do we not acknowledge that schools are a site in which many of society’s most troubling features–racism, sexism, homophobia, class discrimination, and the disparity of cultural capital–are formed and institutionally sanctioned?
I’m all for more competent and better compensated teachers. But the public discourse has only identified part of the problem. Until the conclusions of sociologists attain wider public knowledge, education reform will be doomed to ineffective conversations about where to put the money, where to put the accountability, and who needs the most elbow grease.
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