Class Summary for 1/13 & 1/14

Our first class was spent going over the syllabus and course requirements, as well as some "get to know you" activities that included a biographical scavenger hunt. During the last half of the class, we discussed a general social/political framework for looking at schools. Elements of this framework included the following:

Progressive vs. traditional notions of purpose
Conservative, liberal, and radical perspectives on schooling

Traditional views on the purpose of schooling see schools as existing primarily to pass on the given culture to future generations. Schools exist to transmit the accumulated knowledge, acceptable behaviors, and desired values to children with the hope that the children will grow up to be largely like the past generations of adults. Such views emphasize continuity with the past.

Progressive views on the purpose of schooling see such a degree of continuity as problematic. They note that our current culture is fraught with problems (economic inequality, environmental degradation, racism) and are concerned that overly traditional views of schooling maintain these problems. Instead, progressives want to use schools to change our culture, resolving these problems through the education of the young.

Any given school policy or practice can be understood as existing in tension between these two general poles, although some policies or practices can contain elements of both (e.g. a content module on recycling that is assessed through traditional means like standardized tests).

Conservative, liberal, and radical perspectives roughly map onto the traditional-progressive continuum, with conservative being traditional and progressive falling somewhere between liberal and radical. These perspectives are general ways of seeing the role schools ought to play in our given social sphere; they are shorthand ways of discussing the relationship between schools, society, and the individual.

The conservative perspective is dedicated to free market economics. Under such economic theory, competition is key to economic and social growth. We become better (smarter, wealthier, fitter) through competing with others for limited physical and social resources. Society should be meritocratic -- social positions are filled by the people who have shown to be the best at those positions and rewards accrue according to individual skill at those positions, how essential that position is to the overall well-being of society, and the number of people capable of filling that position (it's supply and demand). The important unit for the conservative is the individual. Each individual is autonomous, rational, and should be treated as an entity unto themselves.
For the conservative, schools exist for two primary purposes:

1. To ensure the proper meritocratic distribution of social resources by providing equal access to educational resources. If everyone has the same access to education, it will really be the smartest and hardest working who will take the most advantage of what is given and rise to positions of leadership.
2. Further enable the meritocracy by being a meritocracy. That is, schools should reward those who work hard and are talented to further cultivate those individuals and to ingrain such habits in the young.

Social problems such as poverty are see as individual failures. People are poor because they made poor choices. People are uneducated because they didn't take advantage of what was offered. Thus, there is little the government can or ought to do to remedy these situations other than making sure everyone has equal access to educational opportunity.

The liberal perspective is similar to the conservative perspective in that it also believes that market capitalism is essential to growth. Liberals, however, note that the market produces undesirable moral consequences (the exploitation of some by others) and is prone to potentially ruinous fluctuation (recession and depression). Similarly, the liberal notes that historical circumstances have loaded certain groups with baggage that makes equal participation in the market difficult (the history of slavery and disenfranchisement of African-Americans). Thus, it's the government's role to eliminate the undesirable moral consequences, mitigate market fluctuations, and compensate groups who have historically been disadvantaged. Schools are a key ingredient for all three. Schools can be used as a key compensatory mechanism to ensure everyone has a level playing field in society. Through equal educational opportunity, groups are able to overcome their historical impediments and fully participate.

The radical perspective is skeptical of the free market approach. It notes that capitalism inherently results in the concentration of wealth and power, and that such concentration is overall negative for human and social growth. This concentration is negative because it allows a few individuals to "rig the game" so that their interests are prioritized over the interests of the majority. These interests become the norm -- they aren't seen as the interests of any particular group, but rather as "the right way to do things". Schools are a key way in which this occurs; they are, in effect, rigged. Poor students are sent to poor schools that lack the resources to properly educate students for anything other than the most ruidemntary social or economic positions, while students of wealthy parents attend schools with programs designed to get them into good colleges. Wealthy folks oppose policy changes (in the tax structure, say), that would equalize resources and give more opportunity to poor students because then those students would compete with the wealthy students for jobs and status. What's more, all schools serve to socialize students to acccept this differtation of wealth as "normal" and attribute the lack of success of poor students as individual failings rather than how the social and economic system is struuctured. While they generally favor similar policy postions as liberals, radicals believe many of our educational problems aren't just problems with schools, but rather problems with our overall social and economic strucure.