Chapter Two

Chapter Two

During the summer following my trip to New York I read constantly.  I devoured Gary Howard's book, "You Can't Teach What You Don't Know" three times.  I read bell hooks', "Teaching to Transgress."  I reread Paulo Freire's, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed."  One of the messages that I found in all of these books is that if you teach against the grain co-workers and district officials will, in many cases, resent you.  If you do not toe the line, be a "team player," do as you are told, then you will become a pariah and, in many cases, suspicious.  If you dare question authority, be prepared to face the consequences.  This is all very typical of the factory model of administration that is firmly entrenched in the public schools.  The colonial mentality dominates a large number of professional educators who have been conditioned not to question authority, to accept the oppressive nature of public schools, the perfect qualifications for a worker in the factory we call school.

Co-workers are often suspicious of other teachers with whom students long to study.  One student's reflection about being in a class where the curriculum was student initiated remarked, “We basically come up with our own curriculum for the semester.  That we are able to do projects on those topics and learn a lot more about them while we do our own research.”  Another student confessed, “You've taught us how to think critically, to challenge, and to confront, and you've encouraged us to have a voice.  But how can we go to other classrooms?  No one wants us to have a voice in those classrooms!” 

Education for democracy means that schools should provide children with the social and intellectual skills to function well as members of families and communities, as political participants, as adult learners, and as self-directed individuals.  It means educating children about the way the world works, and arming them to influence how it works.  The call is for educational values that recognize all student needs as legitimate and that prepare students for multiple roles as adults, regardless of their labor-market destinies or economic status.  The bottom line for democratic education is empowerment, not simply employment (Bastian, Fruchter, Gittel, Greer, Haskins).

Responding to the needs of corporate greed, school systems have historically incorporated a factory model of management that mirrors the workplace. Oppressed by mandated curriculums and increasingly by mandated pedagogy, not only are teachers and administrators strapped by an intimidating educational bureaucracy, but parents and students are essentially ignored and left out of any constructive governance to change an obsolete structure.  The systematic oppression that occurred in industrial America was, and to a great degree still is, present in our nations’ schools.  A multi-layered bureaucracy dictating learning and teaching pedagogy filters down from representatives duly elected by their constituents.  Education background matters little.

What we find is just exactly what the founders of our public education system said that we would find: class stratification and political indoctrination (Kozol).  This pattern has held a dominant position since the inception of public education during the Industrial Revolution.  Economic development has directed school change; economic status has determined school achievement; economic mobility has extended school opportunity.  In this country we accept a system which assumes that people’s lives, the natural resources and everything else exist for the purpose of making money (Horton).   This is nothing new.  President Woodrow Wilson suggested, we want one class of people to have a liberal education, and we want one class of persons, a very much larger class of person, of necessity, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit into specific manual tasks. (Kozol)  In this environment you only had to train a small number of people well and you could afford to train them to think of themselves as better than other people.  Educator Horace Mann, insisted that public education was the cheapest means of self-protection for the rich.  In this setting, passive school curricula help prepare students for life in undemocratic institutions.

Efforts to sharpen the definition of democracy and extend its meaning throughout society are taken by some of the more privileged people as threats to their own status and power.  To understand this view, we need only look at the startling contradiction between the movement for greater school achievement on the one hand and the resistance to equitable spending for all schools on the other.  At the heart of the conflict is a simple question:  Should rich kids be entitled to a better education than poor kids?  Lob this question into any room full of affluent parents and watch them squirm.  To keep school as they have been is to maintain societal distinctions among those who get the best and those who get the rest. (Glickman). 

Democratic schools are meant to be democratic places, so the idea of democracy also extends to the many roles that adults play in the schools.  This means that professional educators as well as parents, community activists, and other citizens have a right to fully informed and critical participation in creating school policies and programs for themselves and young people (Apple and Beane).  Democratic education is a threat to the bureaucratic structure because teachers, as transformative intellectuals, actually challenge the system to conform to their own rhetoric.  Acting as a transformative intellectual means helping students acquire knowledge about basic social structures, such as the economy, the state, the work place, and mass culture, so that such institutions can be viewed from a critical perspective.  This is not to suggest that teachers are merely acting as agents of banking education but rather, having students use new knowledge critically to transform their reality.

The goal of real change in the schools must be education for democracy.  With this goal we would encourage high expectations, cooperation, and equality rather than competition and inequality, and real commitment to our children rather than reforms that do nothing other than tinker with the system. The public school is, after all public, and everyone is part of the public-in terms of financial support, citizenship, and purpose.  Thus, if one’s own child's classrooms and school do not embrace democratic education, one can legitimately ask of educators, why not? (Glickman).  How then, taking into account the considerable amount of ammunition aimed against them are democratically minded teachers, parents, and administrators going to achieve desired goals?