as summaraized by selected quotes from chapter 2 of my ED 120 (Introduction to American Education) textbook:
- Education is a process of human growth by which one gains greater understanding and control over oneself and one’s world….Education is also characterized by continuous development and change. The end product of the process of education is learning….Education knows few boundaries…education is too important to be left to chance….the informal educative process [life] is simply too unreliable.
- In effect, what you were taught in elementary and high school represents your community’s wager—that is, its social bet. It is what the older generation thinks you and your schoolmates will know to live well in the future.
- Our culture tells us what to do.
- Cultures, including school cultures, can be good or bad…
- …socialization, defined as the general process of social learning whereby the child learns the many things he or she must know to become a well-functioning and acceptable member of a particular social environment.
- …schools encourage compliant behavior as opposed to personal initiative.
- In the model of the school as acculturator, schools exist to advance society by ensuring that the young know and appreciate the dominant ideas and values of their society’s culture. The goal of cultural transmission in US public schools is to teach the American way of looking at the world and the American way of doing things.
- Without even being conscious of it, our teachers instruct our young in our version of reality and our way of handling the real world….to transmit the unique culture of the country to its newest members, the young.
- Conflict is viewed negatively, and society works toward finding consensus among various groups and eliminating any conflict.
- The presence of new Americans in a school can be a valuable resource in the effort to increase multicultural understanding and appreciation. Although US schools need to transmit American culture [!], we must realize that what we call “American culture” has always embraced many cultures [therefore we should embrace the token ethnic person!]
- Many of you would say that you attend college because you expect to earn a more comfortable living with a college degree than without one. Americans generally expect that more schooling will lead to greater personal wealth, and, in general, they are right.
- …the school’s responsibility in promoting a healthy social order….schools existed to help mold or guide students into what their society needed and expected of them. A teacher’s job was to help students understand their role in the broader social order.
- They are important because they help to structure the classroom socially as a system of rewards and punishments.
- Things happen because it is time for them to occur and not because students want them to happen.
- Waiting is a familiar activity for elementary school children….Denial of desire is another common experience for the elementary student.
- Delayed gratification and denied desire are learned in school.
- Students are often asked to behave as if they were alone, when they are actually surrounded by thirty or so other people.
- As Jackson remarks, “These young people, if they are to become successful students, must learn how to be alone in a crowd.”
- The ability to control desires, delay rewards, and stifle impulses seems to be characteristic of successful students…
- All too often, students play passive roles in classrooms dominated by regimentation and conformity.
- If teachers preach or push too hard, some students resist. To avoid resistance, individual teachers strive to find the appropriate balance in their classrooms between requiring academic rigor and allowing students to opt out of learning entirely.
- The average or unspecial students are generally ignored…
- Effective, as currently defined in most of the educational research literature, refers to students’ achievement test scores in basic skills such as reading and mathematics.
- Wether one is measuring school effectiveness by test scores on math and reading tests or by the more holistic measures, certain features stand out in the schools that most successfully socialize students to behave in ways that the school values
Reblogging this to say that no one in my class found any of this objectionable…including the teacher. What the actual fuck.
