>
> what, in your opinion, would have to change, in your specific place of
> practice, for teachers to organize more support, and for learning to open
> up...?
Well, as Ken Goodman noted, too much of education is based on a
industrial/business model. Which I understand, since it is a model that
many people _know_ and _believe_ in. So children become products and
parents become consumers, and teachers become productive, etc. etc.
But, in truth your questions overwhelms me. Because as I wrote in
response to Eugene, schools are here for more than providing for students
experiences and activities that will provide avenues for academic success.
We live in a culture that doesn't value children.
We live in a culture that doesn't value women - who are at least 80% of
the teaching force in public schools.
We live in a culture that believes in top-down management and leadership
that is embodied in male-cultural norms.
The women who are teaching are also mothers and wives for the most part
and carrying out the responsibility for maintaining family health and
relationships.
While schools are providing an education for an enormously diverse
the financial resources are limited.
(New Jersey spends $8176. per year per child, California spends
$4448. And San Francisco has $3294. - and lots of students with
particular needs.)
Also, here we are with unemployment at the lowest level in 25 years, and
the original push for academic standards was because we didn't have an
employable work force, which was why we were _losing_ to the Japanese &
Germans.
And jobs aren't paying very well at all.
and and and - yes, as earlier mentioned, I do think that teacher
research is a beginning -
but like all social change efforts, what you begin won't see
fruit until three or four generations later and then they won't notice.
I'm thinking of Rose Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Ida Tarbell, Louise Brogan,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Aphra Behn - just to name a couple of examples.
I'm still staggered that it's been since the early sixties that
Ken Goodman provided for education the assessment tool of running records
and I'm still providing instruction of that tool to teachers who have been
teaching for the last decade.
It takes a loooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng time for ideas to
move through the system just once, much less in a recursive form.
> If my rantings on dysfunctionality aren't dysfunctional, does that mean I'm
> functional? Am I not a NERD too?? ha ha
Ho ho! I'd say you're functioning - but do any of us want to be
functional?
nah! to instrumental and purposive.
phillip
pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu