What Schooling Does to Kids
The purpose of schooling in the United States has never been taken for granted. The religious and cultural pluralism of the country, in addition to its traditions of secularity, civic voluntarism, and suspicion of strong, centralized state power, has resu
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WHAT SCHOOLING DOES TO KIDS
The purpose of schooling in the United States has never been taken for granted. The religious and cultural pluralism of the country, in addition to its traditions of secularity, civic voluntarism, and suspicion of strong, centralized state power, has resulted in a healthy conversation over the past 150 years about what, exactly, compulsory public schooling is meant to achieve. While we live in an era where the conversation inevitable begins at, and never strays far from, various iterations of the learning of core academic subjects and the skills of the three R’s, the existence of a strong counter tradition of child-centered, socially-aware progressive education ensures that these ways of doing school are not the only options which United States citizens see as possible for their children. Given that education is now seen as such a vital part of competing in the new postindustrial global economy, we can probably say the same for much of the rest of the world—the aims of education and public schooling are never taken for granted. Debate exists and we are all in need of the type of intelligent dialogue that would help us gain clarity about what public schooling might yet look like. In this chapter, I want to turn to the past in order to help us chart a course for the future. I want to do this as I look, in particular, at what compulsory schooling has done to children. While my colleagues in the research community might disagree, I would argue that there has been surprisingly little thought given to this question. For as I will attempt to show in the first part of this chapter, the conversation around what compulsory schooling does to children has become rather ossified. On the one hand, there are those who expect the schools to provide children with a level of freedom and maturity that they are assumed in the first place to be lacking. On the other hand, we have those who claim that schooling is an instrument of oppression and that its net result has been to teach children to accept the status quo. In truth, these are two sides of the same coin. Both sides expect miracles and feel a corresponding sense of betrayal when there are no miracles on offer. Current educational policy trades upon this belief in miracles. It trades, as I hoped to make clear above, in illusions. My hope, then, is to disabuse us of the need for miracles in school. Instead, in the second half of this chapter, I hope to show a more complicated picture of what it is compulsory schooling has done to children in the United States. The story I tell there is one that is grounded in the gendered figure of the American elementary school teacher. I want to show how compulsory schooling came to entangle learning— something everyone agrees schools should be about—with love. I want to show 13
CHAPTER 2
how a misplaced desire for intimacy, grounded in the very real feelings of social isolation that are a part of living in a competitive and socially fragmented society, have sidetracked the learning, self confidence and sense of
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