Raining on My Students’ Parades

Posted in Philosophy of EducationSocial JusticeTeaching on Apr 12, 2010 - 09:31 AM

My graduate students tell me that I am depressing them - that I am the unfunny version of Saturday Night Live's Debbie Downer . Well, they didn't actually call me that, but that's sometimes how I feel. I teach the foundations of education course at my university. This is the class where American education is looked at through a critical lens - comparing the historical, Jeffersonian democratic citizenship purpose of education to the social mobility purposes that seem most paramount in schools today. We explore and critique different philosophies of education, deconstruct our society's current politicization of education, examine the injustices of our education system's funding practices, and, in the last few weeks of the semester, try to unearth some positive visions for change.

We are at the point of the semester where we are at the tail end of the deconstruction phase and yet have not begun the reconstruction part. To use a house inspection metaphor, we have torn the walls down to explore the foundations and frame of our education structure, discovered the mold, the termites, and perhaps even the purposeful sabotage of our "building" (see Alfie Kohn's argument for the privatization agenda hidden within NCLB), but we have not yet begun to rebuild - and so my students are bummed, to say the least.

I worry about this very much. The vast majority of my students, at least in the one class that seems most down right now, are either pre-service teachers (people getting their license to teach simultaneous with their Masters, and thus do not have much to any experience on the teacher side of the public education desk), are 5th year Masters students (already licensed, but have only done student teaching), or are provisionally licensed (teaching on emergency licenses, working on the coursework needed to get licensed). These are students who, in many ways, entered my class wearing rose-colored glasses - hoping and imagining that they are in or entering a noble profession (they are), believing that they alone can fight the good fight and make tremendous differences in the lives of their students. And then I enter their consciousnesses and burst their bubbles.

This is purposeful on my part - I do want the students to recognize the systematic injustices built into our public, K-12 system. I want them to get angry at the way many politicians use education as a pawn in their power games. I want them to develop a language for understanding the hidden curriculum that privileges competition over cooperation, extrinsic motivators for learning over intrinsic, standardization over individualized learning, labeling of students over valuing the unique gifts of each child, the mind over the body, the good of the few over the good of the many, and so on.

Yet I don't want them despairing as much as they seem to be now. Maybe I am like a parent desiring to shield her children from the brutalities of the "real world" - or maybe I am taking to heart Rethinking Schools editor Bob Peterson's admonition that "if we neglect to include an activist component in our curriculum [to respond to the inequities we bring to light], we cut students off from the possibility of social change. We model apathy as a response to the world's problems" (Peterson, 1994, p. 38). I don't want my students to be so beaten down by the problems that are illuminated in class as to leave them apathetic. But in 14 weeks, can I really do a good job at both deconstruction and reconstruction? Is it my job to define for them THE solution to our education woes? Or would that bring me too close to being like those who offer false panaceas to intractable societal problems?

Each and every semester I struggle with this issue and all I have been able to come up with is to reserve the last couple of weeks for explorations of possible solutions - for example, in another week, we will be reading the part of Richard Rothstein's Grading Education in which he illustrates ways to "get accountability right" - alternatives to NCLB's practices. We will read excerpts from Rethinking Our Classrooms in which teachers in conventional public schools show how they work to connect their students with issues of equity, social justice, and activism. And we will read a chapter from Svi Shapiro's Losing Heart in which he explores an education for peace. I also try to connect students to the greater world of educational alternatives (such as those explored by IDEA and AERO) in the hopes of them understanding that our education problems can be grappled with in a variety of ways. I try to show them signs of hope wherever I see them [e.g. in Diane Ravitch's latest book where she largely repudiates many of the education "reforms" (e.g. privatization, market control of schools, NCLB, etc.) she had enthusiastically supported in years past].

Most of all, I try to help students understand, as Paulo Freire suggests, that struggle is part of our existence and that we should not despair at signs of problems, but instead embrace them, understand them, reflect on them, and then come to our own conclusions on how to act on them. We each must become agents of change in our own ways and not look to others to prescribe solutions for us. I believe that the desire to to seek such prescriptions is simply further proof of how many of us have been miseducated by our conventional schooling system - that we are so used to the idea that there is some "right answer" out there that our own critical capacities to envision change have been atrophied.

I don't want my students to despair, but then again, if this despair is a necessary step on the path to recognizing that no one is going to provide us with the magic pill to solve our problems and that we each have agency to make change, then I feel fairly OK .....no! I will own this....I feel COMPELLED to to be the education Debbie Downer!


Peterson, B. (1994). Teaching for social justice: One teacher's journey. In B. Bigelow, L. Christensen, S.
Karp, B. Miner, and B. Peterson (Eds.), Rethinking our classrooms: Teaching for equity and justice (pp. 30-38). Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, Ltd.

Tags for this entry:
k-12 education, power, change, hope, alfie kohn, no child left behind, rethinking schools, paulo freire, injustice, diane ravitch

Comment using your Facebook account: