Sometimes I get really proud of papers I have written, even though I know that they're repetitive and go in circles. Please do not repost this, it is my original work.
My philosophy of education incorporates accommodations for learning differences and/or individualized learning, student autonomy, parental involvement, class placement based on learning style and progress, fair treatment and inclusion of minorities and women, accurate portrayal of history, importance of elementary education, protections for teachers, and individualized rather than standardized measures of academic achievement. This paper seeks to provide an argument in favor of incorporating all of these things into the American education system.
My philosophy of education is one in which students are put first with small class sizes and hands-on applications of material discussed in class in order to accommodate different learning styles, and ensure maximum retention of the curriculum. This philosophy embraces the different experiences and lessons students bring from their informal educations into the classroom. Encouraging student autonomy is a key tenant of my philosophy because it is vitally important that students feel they have an ownership stake in their education. Children need to feel safe in their schools; they need to feel that they are able to contribute to their educations in meaningful ways without fear of rebuke from educators or administrators. In contrast to my proposed scheme, The Durkheim system does not allow children to present differing views or methodology without consequence. Durkheim viewed the institution of formal education as a tool for cultural hegemony and the preservation of the society through teaching works venerated in the cannon of society (Durkheim 65). Although my philosophy of education acknowledges the importance of transmitting culture, history, and the ability to operate within the dominant structure of society, it also attempts to be more sensitive to cultural, linguistic, and gender diversity within the student body. My philosophy of education is more closely aligned with Dewey’s theory of education which views schooling as necessary for the continuation of humanity, and states that all experiences are educative because in order to communicate an experience, one must fully understand it (Dewey Education). I also find my theory closely related to his Great Rivers of the World curriculum which aimed to empower students to take responsibility for their education. Dewey’s curriculum provides great opportunity for student autonomy, allowing students to research both independently and in small groups to study culture, sciences, geography, and other aspects of the realities of the great rivers of the world such as the Nile, Indus, Mississippi, Amazon, and Yellow Rivers (Class Notes, 1/30/2013) I chose to incorporate this concept of student ownership and autonomy because it is consistent with my philosophy that all students have the ability to succeed when they are placed in an inviting and accepting school environment.
My views coincide with a radical neo-Marxist philosophy which is in opposition to Durkheim’s philosophy of education and the neo-Liberal movements that he has influenced. A radical/neo-Marxist philosophy of education strongly emphasizes the importance of dismantling systems of privilege and oppression in our schools (Class Notes, 2/11-13/2013). This approach is extremely important in a rapidly changing America. In contrast, Durkheim’s unwavering support of meritocracy serves only to uphold the entrenched socioeconomic systems in a given society. He viewed education as a tool of social cohesion, and thought that by telling students who are unable advance in a meritocratic system to be content with operating on the lower levels of society. According to Durkheim, these students will learn to accept their mediocre intellectual and socioeconomic stations due to the fact that they were informed that they could rise no further than commonplace entry level jobs. My chief objection to Durkheim’s philosophy is the type of thinking that it has since inspired. Organizations such as The Pioneer Fund claim to boast “scientific proof” of the genetic inferiority of non-white peoples (Class Notes 2/4/2013). The principles of the Funds’s work can be seen in American schools that forcibly segregate students on the basis of race and not academic progress. This form of institutionalized race and class based discrimination inevitably places a disproportionate number of children of color in skills and special education classes. The hidden curriculum of these classes impresses upon their students a Social Darwinist theme that they will be low achieving and should be content with performing unskilled labor in the future (Fouron 148-151). These classes and school systems also play a role in the school to prison pipeline found in many states (Citation Needed.) If these schools are accurate implementations of Durkheim’s philosophy, then social cohesion will never be achieved. Not only are students being unduly separated, but students with the potential to achieve more than what their school has prepared them for will become extremely frustrated, perhaps to the point of inciting rebellion. Until America is truly able to claim the title of “post racial society”, social cohesion will unattainable because we live in one of the most diverse societies in the world.
America’s incredible diversity presents several unique challenges for curriculum makers. The presence of such diversity prompts a real need for a social studies curriculum that accurately history without sugar coating or white-washing “less palatable” movements and leaders. The current system operates on the assumption that children are incapable of grasping complex concepts and events such as the definitions of freedom and sovereignty, or motivations behind wars that have defined America’s trajectory into the 21st century. The assumptions those beliefs are predicated on are entirely unsound. If adults are able to have conversations with children about god, religion, and the afterlife (all intellectually demanding concepts because in order to acknowledge a god or afterlife a child must be able to conceptualize a figure and state of being that there is no proof of), then adults can have conversations with children about the “ugly side” of humanity. When schools resort to romanticizing American history and glossing over America's role in domestic and international affairs into a watered-down chronology, they fail to engender critical thinking skills in their students. As a result of schools failing to provide accurate depictions of government mistreatment of people living within America’s borders, students grow to trust narratives that state African slaves were complacently kidnapped and brought to America via the Middle Passage, and that slave living conditions were no worse than the living conditions of factory workers. While I do not advocate showing young children graphic depictions of slavery or slave markets, I do feel that emphasizing the conditions slaves lived in by including diagrams of slave ships and advertisements for slave markets in curriculums starting in elementary school. I am further disturbed by the way the American Civil War has been traditionally taught as a war fought on the ideological and moral opposition to slavery that was wholeheartedly supported by President Lincoln. Lincoln’s canonization in American Education is deplorable. Lincoln was clear in regards to his view of America as a white man’s country with no place for free blacks (Class Notes 2/18/2013.) The Emancipation Proclamation was made by Lincoln as a war measure, while he was under extreme duress, terrified by the prospect that Great Britain would ally with The Confederacy. He feared this alliance would leave America without her cotton industry and subsequently cripple the American economy. The myth that the Civil War was fought in order to free the slaves is one that is perpetuated in grade schools.
America claims to be the home of a post-racial society, and our citizenry points to President Obama’s two terms in office as incontrovertible evidence that racism in the United States is dead. Were the United States is truly a post racial society, it would not be so incredibly difficult to find an accurate account of America’s history with racial and ethnic minorities represented in her nation’s high school textbooks. In modern day America it is sadly considered a “radical” or “revisionist” practice to assign A People’s History of The United States or Lies My Teacher Told Me?When the histories and languages of People of Color are written out of textbooks, outright ignored in the classroom, and prohibited in schools, the alienation of minority children becomes further entrenched in American education and society as a form of white privilege. The validation of the histories and languages of the cultures these children belong to is important not only because it mitigates the effects of acculturation in society at large, but it also makes them feel that their lives and opinions are as valid as their more privileged classmates’ (Multiculturalism).
My philosophy of education places an emphasis on respect for cultural and linguistic differences while conscientiously avoiding appropriation of non-standard forms of English and tokenization of oppressed peoples. The elective separations that occur in Ujamma and Women's Schools fit comfortably into my education philosophy. In these circumstances racial, linguistic, ethnic, and gendered, communities are allowed to remove their children from schools where they are negatively affected by societal oppressions from mixed schooling environments and place them in a homogenous environment in which they are most likely to succeed. This type of separation, unlike the segregation found in Durkheim’s scheme is acceptable because marginalized communities are placing themselves in situations that will allow them to compete with privileged groups instead of being marginalized and oppressed by the state. The first American schools to do this were female seminaries founded during the 19th century. This tradition has continued to today, numerous girls and women’s schools operate in America with a mission to educate girls and women in environments they feel comfortable in (Class Notes, 2/25/2013). Specialized schools and programs benefit students because the students are better able to relate to a curriculum that emphasizes the achievements and contributions of people who share a common identity. Encouraging students to succeed by underscoring past achievements is vital to the success of women and minorities in all fields, especially in science. When little girls learn about Marie Curie and see that she was able to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to become a Nobel Laureate in the field of Chemistry, they become cognizant and confidant of their abilities to make contributions of value to their society. Teaching girls about women like Marie Curie, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, and Sojourner Truth may give them the courage and support they need to set high goals, and reach them the way their male classmates do (Class Notes, 2/25/2013.)
Similar to woman’s schools, Ujamma schools are a special kind of charter school that operate in the inner city areas where black males live with the societal expectations that they will be either dead or in jail by the time they are 21. Ujamma schools turn the tables on this phenomenon by emphasizing achievement and providing an environment that welcomes their students (Charter school’s seniors). The environment in Ujamma schools is different than other public schools because unlike in city run public schools, Ujamma schools only accept black male teachers (Class Notes 2/25/2013.) The dramatically increased graduation rates and acceptance rates to four year colleges seen in these schools is due to a utilization of bona fide occupational qualifications (BFOQ) which allows schools like the Young Men’s Urban Academy to exclusively hire black male teachers (Charter school’s seniors) (Class Notes 2/25/2013). By employing only black males, the schools level the playing field and provide students with an instructor who is not only sympathetic to their plight, but is able to effectively instill the virtues of American education without causing students to feel like they are being forced to forsake their culture in order to succeed in a society dominated by white people.
My philosophy acknowledges the importance of including all aspects of a child’s life into his or her formal education. One of the most critical facets of this process is parent/caretaker involvement in a child’s education. Not all parents have time to go to PTA meetings, lead scouting troops, or serve as a “class chair”, but this does not mean that only the parents who have the time and resources necessary to participate in these activities care more about their child’s education than other parents or caretakers. This system exposes a need for an intermediary between attending every school function and being completely unaware of the day to day happenings of a school. This need has partially been met by the advent of smartphones and a new culture of constant connectivity which allows parents to contact teachers and school administrators on their schedule, not the school’s. Email, however, cannot encapsulate the entire range of human communication, causing important topics and ideas to be left out for fear they will be misinterpreted by the reader. Face-to-face interaction between parents, teachers, and school administrators allows for a certain degree of parental oversight in the planning of curriculums. Parents who send their children to a public school system, funded in part by property taxes paid by homeowners, deserve to be in a position where they are able to have discussions with teachers and administrators about programs, educational materials (textbooks, computers, books in libraries and classrooms), and topics covered by the curriculum outside of the state or federally mandated curriculum. To deprive parents of this permission is to leave them without recourse when a school board decides to entirely restructure the curriculum without consulting them or professional educators. The situation above is not science fiction or fear mongering, it is reality, and in 2010 an Austin, Texas school board wrote Thomas Jefferson out of their American history books because they were uncomfortable with some of his ideals, specifically the separation of Church and State. This school board proposed and passed changes to Austin curriculums and textbooks that replaced a facts-based history curriculum with a curriculum of watered-down conservative propaganda. Furthermore, none of the members of this school board were educators or even experts in Sociology, Economics, or History, three of the subjects that took a substantial hit from the board’s heavy handed editing. One member, Cynthia Dunbar possesses such a tenuous grasp of global history that she stated the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, referred to by many historians as “Liberal Revolutions”, were not at all predicated on Enlightenment philosophies (New York Times).
Women’s and Ujamma schools are remarkable exceptions to a history of substandard charter schools that make a mockery of public education by employing poor practices in testing, parental participation, and pedagogy. In Tonysha Johnson’s account of her experience in a New Orleans charter school she explained just how detrimental the deprivation of student and parent autonomy can be. In her school, students were forced to adhere to a strict dress code, walk in perfectly straight lines, and “reject the culture of the streets” (Johnson) As a teacher, she was not allowed to assign class projects or assignments designed to stimulate student’s creativity, she was forbidden from communicating with parents regarding a student’s progress in her class. No report cards or progress reports were sent home, the only way parents were be able to be informed of their children’s progress was to walk into the school and personally retrieve a progress report. The progress measured in these reports was a print-out of a child’s results on a benchmark standardized test made by a corporation (Johnson). This charter school experience is an excellent case study, showing the pitfalls of privatizing public education from the point of view of an educator.
The partial or complete abolishment of multiple choice tests serves to accurately gauge what a student has learned through oral or written reports at the conclusion of a unit of study. Unlike multiple choice tests, oral and written examinations leave no room for lucky guesses and allow students to fully explore test questions instead of memorizing a series of “correct answers” (Class Notes 1/30/2013). By allowing students to explain their thought processes and opinions individually or in a small group, instructors are able to eliminate cheating while reliably measuring the progress of each of their students. These tests tend to generate reports are more nuanced and therefore are better able to address a student’s specific accomplishments in a unit of study than a score report generated by a multiple choice test can. Reports like this may be a viable alternative to standardized testing at lower grade levels, where it is extremely important to understand why children make grammatical errors and tailor a curriculum that is better suited to teaching the grammatical conventions of Standard English rather than spending countless hours attempting to teach teenagers simple grammar rules.
My philosophy of education addresses the need for student autonomy in two ways, firstly by meeting the specific needs of each student, and then placing them in a learning environment that allows them to reach their full potential, and secondly by abolishing multiple choice tests wherever possible in order to encourage students to make logically sound arguments as well as explain the steps they took to reach their conclusions. Multiple choice tests are unfair tests because they are worded in ways that reflect and exalt the values of the encultured and train students to think that a question will always have one right answer. My philosophy of education highly values individuality and creativity while instilling a strong work ethic in students. It acknowledges that proficiency in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and, mathematics (STEM) does not solely comprise any sound curriculum. The skills and material learned outside of STEM classes, especially in the liberal arts and humanities are extremely important. Examples of these skills include the ability to coherently express ideas and relate events in writing, skills which are highly sought after in today’s competitive job market, yet students are taught that english and history classes are not worthy of their time or attention, and that a person who studies the Humanities must be either independently wealthy or planning on an career in academia.
The suggestions above differ from a tracked education system, which removes student autonomy by disproportionately placing students that have no real cognitive problems into Special Education classes (Class Notes 2/27/2013). The Durkhiemian system contradicts itself when students of high socioeconomic standing are not put into special education classes even though they need them. These students are allowed to enroll in Advanced Placement classes when there are students with less cultural capital students who are more adept than the middle and upper class students at handling the material and concepts taught in the course. My philosophy advocates against this form of tracking and encourages a more holistic approach to class placement that takes socioeconomic and linguistic differences into account when placing children into academic programs or onto a specialized academic track.
Tenure is an integral aspect of my education philosophy because it gives teachers the security to take risks inside their classrooms in order to broaden the minds of their students by utilizing sources that are not a part of the pre-ordained curriculum. Examples of deviating from the approved curriculum include presenting students with a banned book, a political document that criticizes capitalism such as the Communist Manifesto, or critiquing the way that history is written and taught in America (Class Notes, 2/11/2013). Tenure is not and will never will be a shielding mechanism for teachers who are incompetent or abrasive (When Teachers Talk).. Tenure it is a means of protecting teachers from authoritarian principals and school boards when they wish to impress upon their students that there are more sources and points of view than the state was able to put in the textbooks. In my philosophy of education, tenure is given to teachers who have gained the approval of their peers, their students, and the administration over a period of several years. All teachers eligible for tenure must have completed a master’s program by the date their tenure goes into effect. This provision is meant to encourage teachers to earn their masters degrees in Education prior to the start of their teaching career.
This philosophy of education would work well in schools with no established curriculum or schools where grades have been replaced with written reports from instructors. It would also work well in schools with diverse student bodies. By addressing the specific educational needs of each student by a thorough study of vertical files, and research on the way students write, perform computations, and the relate to their peers, educators are better equipped to serve their students. This system will also take any teacher recommendations and past test scores into account when making determinations about course placement. By evaluating students based on past progress, it will hopefully create a system of classification that groups students with similar learning styles and mastery of subject matter together to achieve academic success (Kids Rule the School). This classification system also allows for special placement of gifted students, as well as for students better suited to a skills classroom to attend it without stigmatization of their abilities. Hopefully, this way of grouping students into classes will serve to lessen the impact of negative peer pressure on minority and poor students.
In the critiques I have made above, I attempt to define my ideology by contrasting it with the structures and theories currently in place in America’s public schools. Students deserve to be able to operate outside of a rigidly structured curriculum. Democratic education was designed to mold children into civic-minded individuals who are passionate about what they believe in. In order to more closely adhere to the principles of a democratic education, schools should move in a more democratic rather than meritocratic direction, because discovering something that you are passionate about is much more freeing when you found it on your own. In conclusion, it is individualized learning instead of standardized testing that will provide America’s youth with an education suited for a globally competitive world.
Works Cited and Referenced
"Charter School's Seniors: They're All in." Chicago Tribune 6 Mar. 2010: n. pag. Print.
Dewey, John. "My Pedagogic Creed." Ed. Alan R. Sadovnik, Peter W. Cookson, and Susan F. Semel. Exploring Education: An Introduction to the Foundations of Education. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. 198-201. Print.
Dewey, John. “Education as a Necessity of Life.” Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Pages 1-9. Copyright in the Public Domain.
Engel, Susan. "Let Kids Rule the School." The New York Times 14 Mar. 2011: n. pag. Print.
Fouron, Georges. Class Lecture. Foundations of Education. State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY. January 28 – March 25 2013.
Fouron, Georges. "The Curriculum." Introduction. Behind the Blackboard: Selections on the Foundations of Education. Revised First ed. San Diego: Cognella, 2012. 148-51. Print.
Johnson, Tonysha. "I'm an American Teacher. I Love My Profession. So I Quit." N.p., 2012. Web. 27 Mar. 2013.
McKinley, James, Jr. "Texas Conservatives Win With Curriculum Change." New York Times 12 Mar. 2010: n. pag. Print.
Ravitch, Diane. "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures." 2012. Behind the Blackboard: Selections on the Foundations of Education. Georges Fouron ed Revised First ed. San Diego: Cognella, 2012. 175-188. Print
Roth, Michael S. "Learning as Freedom." New York Times 6 Sept. 2012, sec. A: 27. Print.
Zimmerman, Jonathon. "When Teachers Talk Out of School." New York Times 4 June 2011, sec. A: 21. Print.
