Prompt, Critical Reflection 2, Why School 65–115. Due 9/10.

Last week you reflected on the ways in which your experience of education has shaped your identity and some of the core issues related to the opportunities that are integral to a democratic education.

This week, please reflect on the overarching guiding question of this colloquium?

What is the relationship between education and democracy?

Here is a bit of a road map, to help you think about ways in which Rose addresses this question:

Throughout this text, Mike Rose provides many examples and illustrations of the ways in which public education is central to a thriving democratic society . He outlines many current factors — policy, standards, dichotomizing intellectual and vocational learning, and privileging specific ways of learning and cognitive skills over others — that have impacted and caused huge inequities in public education. .

He writes, “As an ideal, democracy assumes the capacity of the common person to learn, to think independently, to decide thoughtfully ” (85). Yet, our own educational system, accompanying attitudes, and values regarding different kinds of intelligence and skills have become narrowed by standards that don’t account for multiple ways of knowing which are at the heart of the “democratic imagination” (87).

In Chapter 13, “Finding the Public Good Through the Details of Classroom Life,” Rose probes more deeply into the connection between education and civic life and the fact that “we must not simply accept our public institutions as they are, but be vigilantly engaged with them” (156).

Use the text to explore the vital connection between a public education system that empowers all people to think critically/creatively AND a democratic society where people have the capacity to engage in the public square/question the status quo.

Example:

What does Rose mean by “democratic imagination”?

So what? How can and should education engender young people’s capacity for a democratic imagination? Who is most impacted by the lack of this type of education?

Now what? How might we move towards a core competency that includes creativity (167) and policies that portray and promote citizens “not just as economic being[s] but as . . deliberative, civic, moral being[s] as well” (168)?.

A good 3 minute video that breaks down the myth that one teacher can fight poverty versus the need for a systemic shift.