This week’s assignment for The History and Sociology of Education featured the first five chapters of Feinberg and Soltis’ School and Society (Boo!) and the first three chapters of Gladwell’s Outliers (Yay!). I was immediately reminded of my dislike for sociology and was impressed with the apparent inconsistency and hypocrisy embedded in our “Foundations of Education” curriculum. (No blame on our lively and well-educated professors.)
To set up a bit of context here, sociology (the study of our society) consists of three basic, usually competing theories. They are:
· Functionalism: The idea that every cultural phenomenon serves a purpose which is to the greater good of the culture.
o Example: Public school serves our culture’s need to transition children from dependents into producers and to reaffirm our cultural identity.
· Conflict Theory: Every cultural phenomenon serves to reinforce the existing power structure of society.
o Example: Public school serves to reinforce cultural bias which privileges, rich, white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant males.
· Interpretivism (also Symbolic-Interactionism): All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players. They have their entrances and their exits and, in his time, one man may play many parts. (Or something like that.)
o Example: Public school helps us learn to interpret our role in society.
The major problem with all three of these theories (SI to a lesser extent) is that they presuppose 1) the linearity of history, 2) the inevitability of cultural “evolution” & 3) that we, our culture, “modern,” Western Industrial (or are we post-modern, post-industrial?) society is the apex of what a group of people can achieve. Meaning the best, ultimate, most desirable.
What did Mahatma Gandhi say about "Western Civilization?" He said it would be a good idea.
…
Pshhh….
Here we are, spending a third of our time in a class called Native Issues in Education which focuses on the trouble Alaska Native students (who make up 25% of Alaska's student population) have in our public school system when the primary trouble they have is the THRUST of the other two classes! Reconcile that in your noggin!
What is the primary purpose of school?
Noah Webster, author of The Blue Back Speller and, later, Webster’s Dictionary considered the primary purpose of state funded public education to indoctrinate American students into an American culture. “America,” as in, “The United States of,” barely existed at that point. Webster felt strongly that educating the youth via traditional (ie English, as in God Save the King England English) methods would undermine the Revolution that our little colony had just fought and won. He wanted the first words of babes in the cradle to be “Washington.”
Father, I cannot tell a lie... This story was fabricated by a journalist promoting Washington for president.
If you’re not already troubled by the picture I paint, fast forward a generation or two. In the mid-eighteen hundreds there was a massive influx of Irish immigrants into the cities of New England, particularly New York, Boston and Philadelphia. At that time, our nation was experiencing many reforms which included labor laws to keep children out of factories and compulsory education laws.
The compulsory education law was troublesome for the Irish-Catholic immigrants as the overtly Protestant public education system sought to undermine children’s faith in Catholicism and purposefully described Ireland and her descendants in the most insulting ways possible. A Catholic Bishop who came to be known as Dagger John became the advocate for state funding for private catholic schools (the first “charter” school movement). Because people were so outraged at the idea of the government funding a religious institution, a proposition diametrically opposite to the principles of our founding, the compromise was that the state would not fund any religion in public schools.
Future Archbishop of New York Dagger John Hughes
So… How do we educate Ireland out of the Irish? How do we assimilate these immigrant children into a greater American Society? What does it mean to be an American?
These questions are very real. They have been and continue to be asked all around the country. Your children are currently in an institution that has asked those questions, come up with an answer and is indoctrinating its beliefs into your kids!
With these questions we successfully eradicated most of the Indian languages (and, therefore, cultures) native to this continent with three generations of BIA Indian Schools.
These students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania are examples of students who were forcibly taken from their families, shipped hundreds of miles across the country, beaten for speaking their language and trained to be factory workers.
How do you feel about homeschooling now?
Michel Foucault will be remembered as one of the greats in twentieth century philosophy.
Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, came up with a very interesting idea called “institutionality.” That concept is to encompass the way different aspects of our culture reinforces the dominant ideology of the culture. For instance, the Dick and Jane series of primary school readers, shows Jane in a dress, helping mom, as an audience for the active Dick who is most often engaged in active play and getting in trouble. This is a prime example of how our school, while in the process of teaching children to read, is also in the process of indoctrinating little boys and girls in proper ways to appear and behave.
Oh, oh, see Jane. Good little Jane.
Teachers, as products of our culture, are not immune to the effects of institutionality and, by their own actions, perpetuate cultural norms. Why are girls more likely to experience math anxiety and not do well in science? There are many theories, one of which is that teachers, believing that boys will do better, encourage boys more in those subjects. There was a classic study done on teachers, testing whether a teacher’s belief in a student’s ability would effect that students ability to perform.
So, to get back to the point, on the one hand, we are being taught that the reason why our educational system is failing 25% of our student population (ie Native Alaskans) is that the way our culture learns, teaches and behaves is completely foreign to those students way of being. On the other hand, we are being taught that the curriculum, the body of information which it is our job to impart to our students, is merely the agar in which our ideology festers. We are being taught that it doesn’t matter what we teach kids, as long as the way we teach them is imparting the social mores and cultural norms that someone has decided they should learn.
*sigh*
Add that to the fact that, as it turns out, the Native ways of learning and knowing have been found be scientific research in cognitive and behavioral psychology to be far superior to our classic “Western” methods. Nice.
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