understanding is change

Understanding is change.

Socrates.” There is no voluntary evil. Only ignorance ‘
As curriculum specialists, do.we work for politicians and business, or In the interest of educators ‘and students? Betrayal by unions, colleges, the, politicians, and the ‘National Cornell for. Accreditation of Teacher Education-demanding all teachers perform equally well in. all school settings is Bush rhetoric, and not feasible. When NCATE agreed with Bush, they sold out teachers by agreeing with anti-illectual and de-professionalizing agendas.

Government betrayal – The Bush administration wit NCLB No Child Left Behind calls for increased testing, increased professional standards for teachers. Paige questions whether teacher certification should be separated from coursework in education. This way, the people who study education would do so out of intellectual interest. Pg 220 Would this work? Do low salaries, a lack of professional respect, and scapegoating affect the ability of schools to find and retain “quality” teachers?

Keeping Hope Alive
“The professional preparation of teachers requires understanding curriculum as interdisciplinary, grounded in self-formation and historical moment.” Remember that curriculum is different than the syllabus. In many colleges and universities, bureaucrats control the curriculum.

Teachers cannot reach all students. In the end, it is parents who have the most control over students attending class, studying, and doing homework. We must provide opportunities for students, and they must be responsible for taking advantage of these opportunities. To understand curriculum we have to acknowledge the limits teachers face and the bureaucratic procedures in place.

Recapturing the curriculum
A new idea is an unsettling of received beliefs; otherwise, it would not be a new idea.” John Dewey

Perhaps the growing trend of small, specialized schools will allow for greater curriculum experimentation. Maybe we could fast-track teachers and provide them with mentoring and intensive academic study. We should not link curriculum to standardized exams!!!!! McNeil believes that the term standardization on serves to widen the gap between the majority and the minority. However, because schools have “capitulated” to government influence over the curriculum, curriculum theorists have little control over the public school curriculum.

The nation is leaning South politically. Many Presidents from the 60’s onward came from the south. Progressives in the South are often reticent to raise their political voice. Many white southerners are nostalgic for the past, when racial and gender biases were the norm. “The South lost the War but has won the peace….Public education is but one casualty.” Pg 235. Fundamentalist Christianity continues to influence public education.
Our only hope is teaching our children according to our own “inner standards.”

Presentism (living in the present) and denial of the past occurs throughout America, not just in the South. People are focused on immediate gratification, bottom lines, and have little interest in everything else. Currere should “contradict presentism by self-consciously cultivating the temporality of subjectivity, insisting on the simultaneity of past, present, and future, a temporal complexity in which difference does not dissolve onto a flatted social surface.” Until the South re-experiences (acknowledges) its past mistakes and its history, southern students will not be able to work through their anger, guilt, and mistrust. “Without self understanding, there can be no social reconstructivism.”

Curriculum as a social psychoanalysis needs to represent race, class, and gender. The point of public education is to become an individual who is able to integrate into and become a meaningful member of society. It is not “gracious submission” or the “deferment of pleasure until graduation.” Everything in our culture becomes embodied in our classrooms.

Teachers should constantly strive to learn. They should take classes and experience cultures throughout the world. Students must take responsibility for their own learning. Parents must take responsibility as well.

International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies (www.iaacs.org)

Horace Mann – founder of public education – believed that good schools could erase crime, eliminate poverty, and serve as “the great equalizer” between the rich and the poor. Did we start out too ambitiously? Can we go back and undo some of the reforms we have put into place?

Self-understanding
Self-mobilization
Social reconstruction

Hopefully the “complicated conversation” will continue.