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.

Chapter 2

After WWII veterans were able to enter college due to the GI Bill. These veterans were academically prepared for college. The skills these men learned in high school were not adequate, and other students resented their presence. Fast forward to Sputnik and America losing the space race, and Kennedy along with many other politicians believed that the answer to America’s lack of scientists and mathematicians (MILITARY MIGHT) would be to strengthen America’s schools.

During Reagan the “lax” conditions of America’s public schools put the nation “at risk.”
Focusing on science, math, and technology.

The Kennedy Administration emphasized physical education standards in schools, which can be seen as the “feminization” of teaching and the emphasis on the “masculizaiton” of the student body. Pinar believes that there was only interest in the white student’s body, not “the body of young black men.” Kennedy tried to instill “freedom, toughness, and courage.” Female physical fitness was useful so girls could meet a boy.

In the late 40’s and early 50’s there was a widespread fear of homosexuality.in society and media.

Most teachers until recently were women. Teaching was one of the only occupations deemed “acceptable” for women. However men made the curriculum.

“The Civil Rights movement, animated by student-led organization such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) - intensified the racialization of education in the (white) public mind, where desegregation was fought both in school buildings and in school textbooks.”

The Racial Politics of Curriculum Reform –
Racial tensions in the United States have deeply affected out schools and curriculum. In the 1950’s “racial violence in the United States amounted to complicity with the Communist plot.” This helped fuel both racial division, anti-intellectualism, and anti-communist propaganda.

“By resisting the inclusion of important African Americans in school textbooks, these same European Americans were insuring that America would have no future to be proud of.”

Students and the Civil Rights Movement
The struggle for civil rights was for the most part led by students. One group that was a big party of the civil rights movement was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Pinar chose to focus onn this group because it is the “most student-affiliated wing of the civil rights movement.” The SNCC was the “shock troop” of the civil rights movement. The SNCC focused on political rights for African-Americans. The SNCC was strengthened by activisms in Mississippi during the summer of 1961. (Freedom riders). The SNCC was important in the move to desegrate lunch counters and achieves social reform.

Protesters of the Vietnam War movement learned a lot from the South.

Freedom Schools
SNCC worked Charles Cobb envisioned schools in the South that actually supported academic freedom. The curriculum was devised by educators, clergymen, SNCC workers, in NY in 1964 and included usual school subjects plus contemporary issues, cultural expression, and leadership development (history of civil rights struggle) There were evening classes, day classes, classes that accounted and for a summer farming schedule. Freedom schools were part of a larger social goal of establishing integration and trust amongst races.

“In the United States,” Lesko points out, “the remasculinizing of schools includes a number of features: the spread of competitive sports; higher standards through increased testing; a more rigorous curriculum; zero-tolerance policies; and redoubled efforts in math, science, and technology.” Nowehere is this reactionary and racialized remasculinization more obvious than in the American South.

The Significance of the South

Unfortunately “Place” has been largely absent from the curriculum. Psychoanalysis would suggest a “place” is a form of social psychoanalysis; it permits the student to emerge as “figure,” capable of critical participation in a historical present widely ignored and denied.”pg 94 Curriculum was “standardized in response to a mass entry of immigrants from 1890-1930 as well as “the great migration” of southern blacks north, in search of economic opportunity and to escape lynching/” 94.

The south has a history of slavery, segregation, violence, and relative poverty. We separate ourselves by race, gender, and class. By understanding and examining our social situation it may be possible to advance our current situation.

II – Racial and sexed bodies contains information about the sexuality of black men and women in the realm of the south and slavery. Phillis Wheatley was a gifted poet in the late 1800’s-early 1900’s. She was educated as an “experiment” to see if “Africans could be said to be human in the European sense” and were “culturally human.”
This chapter talks of slave rebellions, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Anna Julia Cooper. There are 2462 recorded lynchings of African Americans, most of whom were men. Lynching was often sexualized violence, involving sexual mutilation, and happened because an African American acted “sexually” towards a white woman. There is a myth of black male rape and white women. Often lynching was “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized an “keep the nigger down’ “ (Wells 1970, 64)

Modern day – Clarence Thomas likened Anita Hill’s accusations and the court proceedings to “high tech lynching.” Racism requires political and pedagogical action.

The remainder of chapter one

2 “Untimely” concepts
Concept of curriculum as conversation.
The point of education is not only to prepare students for success in college classrooms, but to enter and be a functional part of society.

“The school curriculum communicates what we choose to remember about our past, what we believe about the present, and what he hope for the future.” Page 20


“Curriculum theory aspires to understand the overall educational significance of the curriculum, focusing especially upon interdisciplinary themes-such as gender or multiculturalism or the ecological crisis-as well as the relations among the curriculum, the individual, society, and history.” Pg 21.

Now this is very important. The role of minorities, African Americans, women, and minorities has been pushed to the side. The “white male” is who the system was designed for, and modifications to both the curriculum and society must be made. (The book – I’m not expressing an opinion)

3. Too Little Intellect in Matters of the Soul”: on the education of teachers
Curriculum theorists would like teachers to focus on independent thinking, seslf-reflexivity, and interdisciplinary teaching.
Now – as educators we are skeptical of the business metaphor, but what metaphor should we use? Biograpahies are too fictionalized – It is the autobiography that is an important part of social analysis. “Curriculum theory is a form of autobiographical and theoretical truth telling that articulateds the educational experience of teachers and students as lived.”

4 The school as a business
Most American schools are still modeled after the assembly-line factory. If we hold this to be tall, then where does that leave the educator/ teacher? As h “S0cial engineer” where we manage learning. Standards anon of the teaching model then reduces the teachers role further.
The plus side to the corporate model is that teachers, while they have standards, can find their own unique ways of teaching to them. Team teaching, small group work and cooperative learning all are part of the corporate model. Corporate model tends to give room to teaching towards multiple Un intelligences, according to “Gardner”
Terms. Manager & coach tend to “masculine “ this model?


4. Figure of the schoolteacher. “Rejecting colonization by the hegemonic disciplines such as psychology, curriculum theory explores and constricts hybrid interdisciplinary constructions, valuing fragments from philosophy, history literature theory, the arts, and from those key interdisciplinary formations already in place women’s studies d gender studies, African. American studies, queer theory studies in popular culture, among others.’

The Nightmare that is the Present - actual title

1. Miseducation of the American Public -
Think of public education as a reconstruction of self and society. Take all of society’s ills, put them together, and this is the state of public education.

Teaching, from the point of view of the curriculum is a way of enabling students to use what they learn in school to “understand their own self-formation within society and the world” We want their understanding to be both local and global. Academia must recognize that the American public is miseducated. Are we too heavily focused on the business model bottom line? Business leaders want to centralize control of schools. Do schools exist for job preparation or do we have loftier goals? Is there a “cash value” to education.

Discussion: Does the factory model have value in the field of education? Teachers are elevated to the role of managers, students are prepared to enter the work force, etc.

Are teachers educators or technicians “managing” student productivity?

Preface and Introduction

What is Curriculum theory?

According to Pinar, curriculum theory is the “interdisciplinary study of the educational experience.” In exploring curriculum theory, Pinar explores the past – American history to date, the oppression of African Americans, the subjugation of women, and “white guilt.” Pinar does not stick fully to one definitive view. He explores many different possibilities of each argument and supposes the reader will make his/her own choices.


In the preface Pinar wrotes about the American South, the 1960’s democratic Presidential campaign that was the start of standards based curriculum, the anti-intellectualism of the current system, where teachers are forced to teach parents, neighbors, etc – anyone who will listen.

Introduction –
Defines curriculum theory and states the school has become a skills-and-knowledge factory. This is based on the corporate structure, where we as teachers are elevated to the role of manager rather than factory worker.

He references Christopher Lasch. Who believes that Americans have become lost in themselves and their work. People retreat into their private lives to get some peace, only to discover they have no privacy there either. This narcissistic view traps people.

“Racism and mysogny have been “deferred and displaced” into public education.”

The National Curricular reform movement is designed to align secondary school standards to the university, thereby establishing academic “rigor”. Now the question is – is the role of the schools to establish academic rigor, allowing students to enter the university at a higher academic level, or are we merely creating workers for a factory model?

Teachers are scapegoats for politicians.

Due to:
Anti-intellectualism of American society,
Racism,
Misogeny
The white southern cutlture
The field of education has remained underdeveloped intellectually. To combat this, we must renew our commitment to intellectualism, recognize and explore forces against us.
This will allow us to help build creative, intellectual, and nurturing schools.