“[E]ven when students are willing to cooperate, they are still children. They are immature, disorganized, unreliable, and easily distractible, and they begin their schooling with little or no experience of the kind of sustained, focused, purposeful work that is required for learning. This simple fact – that teachers work with children rather than adults – has profound implications for teachers. For their task is not merely to teach other human beings about school subjects, but also to teach them how to cooperate and how to learn, neither of which comes naturally, so that teachers must also persuade students that all of this is worthwhile.”
“Attribution Error and the Quest for Teacher Quality” by Mary Kennedy in Educational Researcher, November 2010 (Vol. 39, #8, p. 591-598)
With all the discussions moving about Washington DC and St. Paul concerning education there are some factors that need to be remembered. We are dealing with children and their families. Schooling is not a natural activity. If one is dealing with an uncooperative child (or family), the task of providing schooling becomes tremendously more difficult.
The popular notion at the moment for both DC and St. Paul is to move the cooperative children to charter and hope for the rest. Clothed in fancy words it appears that some politicians are ready to abandon public - free and appropriate - schools for a separated system of schools that empower children who have supportived and aware families to choose to be separated from the type that is "forced" to take everyone.
In the name of something are we encouraging a system of have's and have not's?
No comments:
Post a Comment