Thanks for such an eloquent essay on problems with mainstream compulsory
schooling.
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, May 20, 1999 11:50 PM
> To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: A call to radically rethink high school
>
>
> In brief response to Ken, Leon Botstein has all the connections to the
> Times he needs without any further help. His career was promoted by what
> could broadly be called liberal political factions, associated
> mainly with
> upper-middle class interests and with the classic impulse to aid the
> downtrodden as a second agenda. No doubt he is more conservative
> today than
> in the 70s, but is still more likely to be supported by old-style
> (non-radical) liberals or neo-liberals than by neo-conservatives.
>
> Education seems to be an area where the lines between liberal and
> conservative are a bit hard to follow unless you belong
> passionately to one
> camp or the other. Even in my generation we're not at all sure how ideas
> get labeled as conservative or liberal, other than by who backs them. My
> students, I think, are a bit fed-up with the notion that there
> are only two
> political possibilities in the entire universe of human meaning.
>
> I remember meeting and talking to Ivan Ilych when I was student,
> as well as
> reading De-Schooling Society a long time ago. I thought then that
> he made a
> pretty good case; my memory of high school was still pretty fresh at the
> time. I also remember leaving a large-group 'dialogue' with him -- in a
> student lounge, he was not letting himself be cast too much into the role
> of a teacher, though he was treated as a 'guru' by many -- and commenting
> to a friend, "What he's saying is that libraries are freer places for
> learning than schools." For some students libraries _are_ better places to
> learn than schools. Still better, I think now, and for more
> students, would
> be learning communities without curricula or compulsion, where, as in a
> library, or on the net, you can go to explore knowledge and find
> answers to
> your questions, but where in addition you collaborate with others in
> learning projects --- when and as you and they wish --- and where you also
> have contact with adults who can introduce you to ideas and questions you
> might not have considered on your own, and finally where the lines between
> learning and living are not so tightly drawn -- where your learning
> projects can become, or start as, action projects in the common world of
> kids and adults.
>
> If we really want to critique the notion of schools as they have
> turned out
> since the late 18th century, maybe we should begin not with their
> educational failures, or with their anti-intellectual and compulsory
> curricula, and not even with their stifling of creativity and pervasive
> boredom, but with the basic notion that it is intellectually, morally, and
> emotionally unhealthy to segregate everyone from the age of 5 to 18 from
> the common public sphere.
>
> Untimely as it is to say this, I would consider someone justified in
> killing rather than allowing themselves to be forced to be a high school
> student. I'm a peaceable sort myself, but if anyone tried to force me into
> that position, I would react rather violently. One of the problems I have
> in my career as an educator is the terrible feeling in my gut that I get
> whenever I set foot in a high school and begin to empathize with the
> students. I just hope it doesn't feel as bad to them as it does
> to me; when
> I was a student it certainly didn't, but then I was an extra-ordinarily
> lucky student in many ways. Still, I think that I was socially and
> emotionally crippled by being locked away for all those years from normal
> contact with the rest of the adult world and from doing any sort of
> socially valuable or productive activity.
>
> For every kid who blows up a school, there are thousands who'd
> like to. Why
> should we doubt that they have good reasons to feel as they do?
>
> JAY.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
>