Critical Issues in Education

1
Critical Issues in Education

• Course Notes
• Charlie Skipper
• Fall, 2005

2
Friday, Class 1

• Plan of Action
• Introductions and Housekeeping
• Syllabus Review
• Create the Presentation Teams
• Paige Emerich Technology and the Writing
  Process at EA
• Review Charlies Questions/Add Others
• What is Unassailably True about Education?
• Curing Presentism Roots in Education
• Philosophy and History

3
Focusing Questions

• What is unassailably true about education?
• What is the problem of presentism and why is it
  so pervasive?

4
Roots in Education

• Education Educere (to draw or bring out) v
  Educare (to train or bring up)
• Historical Overview
• Pre-Greek
• Greek Models Socrates then Academies
• Church and Monasteries
• Middle Ages and Universities
• Pre-University Education Until French Revolution

5
Roots in Education

• Elements pre-French Revolution
• Elite
• Religious
• Tutors
• Post-French Revolution
• European Model Meritocracy, State-Sponsored
  Education to Secular Ends, Harkens to Chinese
  Civil Service approach of national testing to
  privileged education

6
Roots in Education

• Post-American Revolution
• Traditional
• New England and Schools to learn to read bible
• Southern tutors to train the elite for admission
  to universities
• Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann
• TJ Public education required for a democracy
• Mann Public education required for the workplace

7
Roots in Education

• Industrial Revolution, Romanticism and Child
  Labor
• Education comes to be seen as something other
  than an elite privilege
• In the US, due to immigration, education comes to
  be seen as a mechanism for assimilation tool of
  the melting pot
• Labor gets organized and wants to move children
  out of the labor force
• Romanticism and reformers seek to improve the lot
  of all, including children, and horror stories
  like those of Charles Dickens led to child labor
  laws AND a need for a place for children to be

8
Roots in Education

• Public Schools, by the latter half of the 19th
  century, become the place that children should
  be.
• 1st Curriculums based on elite notions of what a
  person should learn
• African America divides on the question of
  education
• Booker T. Washington Vocational Ed
• W.E.B. Dubois Elite Education

9
Roots in Education

• Work of John Dewey and Progressive Education
• Students should be actively engaged in their
  learning
• Students learn best when they study subjects or
  ideas related to their lives and world
• Rejection of classical and elite model of learning

10
Roots in Education

• Rise of Business Models and Interest in a
  Trained Workforce
• Efficiency and effectiveness studies from
  Taylors work were applied to school settings
• Schools as factories students as products of
  managerial processes
• Role of school is to rationalize the process of
  creating good workers

11
Roots in Education

• The Great Depression Undermined much of the
  business orientation and outcomes focus Why?
• Rise of Professionalization of the Field
• Accreditation of Schools
• Ending Normal Schools and Rise of Required
  Degrees
• Growth of Education Schools and Licensure