Reinventing Schooling

The section on "The Business of Schooling" caught my attention and raised a red flag for me. While the idea of reinventing education can seem helpful within the classroom by incorporating important materials to enhance instruction, now whiteboards and smartboards, it seems as if people looked to outside sources to replace traditional instruction and the presence of the teacher with factory-like machinery and business settings. These large corporations who are in charge of developing new ways of schooling replace the teacher, the most essential part of the classroom, as an "instructional manager." This gives the feeling that teachers are not necessary in the educational process and are just there to supervise. The difference between schools and industry is huge. The corporations are using students as guinea pigs in their experiment to make profit, as the example in the book has shown. Education is not just about teaching basic skills; it is so much more than that. There aren't easy solutions to educational problems and the problems won't be solved by allowing corporations to step it.
And it's annoying that people blame teachers for everything that goes wrong. The book says that teachers were rarely consulted in the process of advocating and implementing technology (121). No one thought it would be wise to ask the teachers, the ones who know about educating students, what they thought? They didn't even use tv, film, and radio within the classroom because of the "lack of coordination of programs with curriculum" (123). Well, why else would teachers need to implement these new forms of schooling into their classroom if it wasn't even relevant? It doesn't seem as if people are taking these into consideration. Instead, teachers are blamed for being indifferent and lethargic. Let's reinvent solutions to this problem.