Sunday, April 02, 2006

Education and Teacher Education for Democracy

Every year for a month or two at least, we commemorate the struggles for freedom, social justice, and peace that were embodied in the short, remarkable life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others who have fought to realize the ideals of equality on which the political philosophy of the Republic was founded. They are the politics expressed by Dr. King, himself, when he said “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” They are the same politics celebrated recently by those attending the memorial service for Dr. King’s late widow who, as Rev. Lowery reminded us, “opposed discrimination based on race—she frowned on homophobia and gender bias.” They are the same politics urged by President Clinton, when he made this challenge to all of us: “You want to treat our friend Coretta like a role model? Then model her behavior.”

They are the same politics that, unfortunately, are now scrutinized and savaged by the representatives of a radical minority of educational and social fundamentalists, who would turn back the clock on social progress by making a commitment to social justice irrelevant to good teaching. These conservative critics, including Geoge Will and Fred Hess and the Fordham Institute, would have us believe that racism and injustice is no longer a concern for the classroom, and that all attention should be placed on education as economic preparedness. They would, indeed, turn a commitment to social justice into a partisan value, something that liberals do, and thus something that should be avoided like any form of indoctrination in the classroom.

These critics have gone on the attack recently against the professional preparation programs for teachers that make dispositions toward caring and social justice and equity central components in assessing the preparedness of their teacher candidates to teach in the classrooms of America. These radical rightists see no place in the university classroom for preparing teachers who share the values of Dr. King, or any of those Republicans and Democrats who rose at Coretta Scott King’s memorial to remind us of the Kings’ unfinished legacy of non-violent resistance to bigotry and oppression.

The political logic of the new critics reflects some very old sentiments that most of us, fortunately, have chosen to leave behind. In sacrificing the goal of social justice in favor of a feigned political neutrality, it no longer matters if Johnny’s teacher embraces the values of skinheads or Klansmen, just as long as she is able to get Johnny a passing grade on his proficiency exam or his AP test. Nor does it matter, in this twisted logic that makes the promotion of democracy a partisan issue, if Johnny’s teacher rejects the values expressed in our Constitution or Declaration of Independence, just as long as he gets Johnny interested in contributing to an economic future that includes the studied oversupply of engineers, scientists, and technicians.

While fitting these blinders onto teacher educators, teachers, and American children may serve those who wish to conflate political freedom, moral freedom, aesthetic freedom, religious freedom, cultural freedom, and intellectual freedom into a selective and self-serving version of economic freedom, such a plan will never work to engender a free and responsible citizenry capable of sustaining the continuing struggle for a true democratic republic, one that places human rights and civil rights at the forefront of all societal decision-making.

Although I would argue that every human is born with a preference for autonomy and liberty rather than for repression and enslavement, that preference only becomes a living ethical value through modeled teaching, plenty of questioning and practice, and commited professional guidance in that practice. The intellectual chain gangs for the poor or the socially-inert IB or AP classrooms for the middle and upper classes, however, remain the models that for those neo-traditionalists who would try to convince us that a commitment to freedom and democracy are partisan values that are unimimportant to teaching in American schools.

What the social antiquarians and the new wave of school room scientizers disingenuously argue is that we, as a nation, must choose between a narrow intellectual competence for economic competitiveness, or a broad social consciousness for cultural understanding and critical awareness. I believe that most Americans view this either-or proposition as the divisive and false choice that it is, and if given the chance to decide, there is still a good chance that they will choose to re-invigorate their public schools toward all of these important purposes for all of our people, not just the ones who can afford to remain neutral.

4 comments:

Craig A. Cunningham said...

I furled my brow when I read Jim Horn's sentence that ends "an economic future that includes the studied oversupply of engineers, scientists, and technicians." I guess I had bought the commonly-spouted view that the U.S. faces a shortage of talented scientists and engineers--a shortage that could hurt our economic competitiveness. Well, turns out that Jim is right: there is no shortage of scientists. A good place to begin to understand this is this editorial from the Washington Post.

Craig A. Cunningham said...

Also see http://web.archive.org/web/20041011100403/http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2003fall/article2.html

Aaron Schutz said...

For a more general discussion of the (lack of) relationship between education and economic growth, see:

Education - it's not for the economy, stupid!
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA640.htm

"Developing" nations who have sought to increase economic growth through widespread education have often created enormous internal discontent as the educated are unable to find jobs to fit their skills.

David Berliner and Jean Anyon have both recently argued that improved education comes as a result of decreases in poverty and not the other way around. Thus, significant educational improvement in central cities, especially, seems likely only in the context of social action for larger social change.

See David Berliner, "Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform" at Teachers College Record and
Jean Anyon's new book, Radical Possibilities.

Anonymous said...

I'm of about seven and a half minds on the social-justice possibilities of teacher education. On the one hand, I've written elsewhere online (I forget where) that the whole of the human-participants apparatus of American research requires consideration of justice (in the third part of the Belmont Report from the 1970s that's the basis for IRB activities), so it's not true that established universities always eschew notions of justice. On the other hand, I'm not sure that's the same as pushing for a specific approach towards redistributive or procedural justice. On the third hand (I'm certainly not Truman's ideal one-handed economist), I agree with Lisa Delpit that there's nothing inconsistent with focusing on concrete skills and also seeking to undermine existing inequalities. On the fourth hand, I'm not sure teacher education is the best place for that, given the overwhelming undergraduate location for teacher education and the limited time that affords us for anything. On the fifth hand, you gotta start somewhere. On the sixth hand, there are a whole host of reasons why teaching tends to be a conservative occupation in many ways, and teacher education can't inoculate teachers against all of them. On the seventh hand, teachers do overwhelmingly identify themselves as agents of social change (despite other conservative tendencies), and that affords some opportunities. On the eighth hand, the fact that some conservatives (and liberals) may be attacking teacher education for ideological bias against individual students doesn't mean that those concerns are thus entirely wrong. On the ninth hand, there should be appropriate space for specific institutional missions (including for teacher education), and those missions already stretch across public-private boundaries (e.g., West Point, which is a public institution with a quite specific mission).

And I think I'll have to stop here, because I'm not sure what I'll do with a tenth hand. Time to return to reading student papers on a lawsuit in the imaginary Anchovy Township, I think.