| Orange County, CA | November 5, 2002 Election |
 |
A Deeper Position Paper on Democratic SchoolsBy Thomas C. WilsonCandidate for Board Member; Laguna Beach Unified School District |
This information is provided by the candidate | |
Saying what can't be said in forums and flyer bulletsIt should not be news to any one that for its entire history the adequacy and effectiveness of American public education has been under attack from both the left and the right. During the past 20 years or so, these assaults, primarily coming from the right, have hurled barrage after rhetorical barrage aimed at the schools' failings academically (rarely stated as even "intellectually") thus putting our nation "at risk" by producing students incapable of competing in an increasingly sophisticated global economy. This finding resulted in a myriad of corporatized, commercialized, marketized reform efforts designed to improve student achievement and performance (images of animals in the circus come to mind here) usually assessed by ritualized testing whereby the test as "examination" has achieved a cold, clinical icon like, fetish like reverence devoid of any human warmth and exclusive of anything smacking of affect, emotion, personalization, or dare I say love. I lament the continuing separation, the lack ofdialectical unity between the cognitive and affective domains in which traditional teaching and learning ignores the determining nature of emotions and feelings in constructing cognition, a finding which seems to me to be a more recent reiteration of the gestalt work of confluent educators some 30 years previous. Most of current school change rhetoric, lacking this unity, is usually jazzed up with a strong paean to the doctors of technological rationality who prescribe computers with a strong dose of e-mail to cure us all. Jennifer Smith, an English teacher in an urban Chicago high school rejects the diagnosis, "I wish I, like the current administration, could believe that if we just had connections to the Internet, all of my kids would become honor students". Technology, testing frenzy, national and state standards, increasing loss of local control, vouchers, privatization and control of teachers' work (although not usually defined as such) still dominates much of the chit chat about education. While many are apt to take umbrage with the use of the term chit chat as disingenuous I disagree, for most talk about education within schools is like, as the Brazilian educator Freire often said, "mosquito running across the water" rather than plumbing the depths of authenticity, dialogue and ethics. I believe that while there has been massive changes ininstitutional surface structures, the core of educational practice, the deep structure, remains virtually impervious to change in all but a small fraction of American schools and classrooms. The core for me consists of understandings about the nature of knowledge and learning, structural arrangements of schools such as physical space, student grouping practices, relations between teachers and teachers and students, and processes for assessing and communicating student learning. The issue then becomes one of understanding as to what end the core should be directed, what is its ultimate aim? I argue that the answer must be democracy. The cement that binds, or should bind, the elements of the core together is a conscious attention devoted to the development of a democratic culture thereby trumping the nation at risk thesis. Having said this, I do believe that there are cracks,small cracks, in the impervious wall. While the outcome is far from clear, it is within this democratic grounding of the core that things are perhaps are looking up. The rhetoric, the "espoused theory" of which Chris Argyris of Harvard speaks is being matched by practice, not by many but by enough to give us all significant hope. The bald faced functionalism, narrow implications, and abject pessimism of the nation at risk hypothesis is under siege by a dialectical counter attack formed by the ideas of ethics, community, voice and empowerment. I would like to see the Laguna Beach schools become a significant player in this movement. The foundation to accomplish this action does exist yet much needs to be done. It is our democratic obligation to so proceed. |
Candidate Page
|| Feedback to Candidate
|| This Contest
November 2002 Home (Ballot Lookup)
|| About Smart Voter
ca/or Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 23, 2002 18:52
Smart Voter <http://www.smartvoter.org/>
Copyright © League of Women Voters of California Education Fund.
The League of Women Voters neither supports nor opposes candidates for public office or political parties.