Dear Reader,
For today's post I will refer to the reading “A talk to a teacher.” This reading reminded me about chapter 2 Political Economy of Education from a book by Saltman. (I read this chapter in one of my education classes a year ago, so I’m not sure what the title of the book is.) In this chapter it talked about how students who come from a lower income background and they attend a school in a low-income neighborhood, then their school is most likely teaching them to become docile workers. For example, when a classroom is lecture based where the teacher is mostly just presenting then this causes students to become trained to just follow the direction of the teacher. This will later prepare the student to follow the direction of their bosses.
On the other hand, the chapter explained that if a student comes from a higher income and goes to a school in a higher income neighborhood then the school is training the student to become a leader in society. In this school setting students are given the opportunity to develop their leadership skills.
Both of these examples from chapter 2 demonstrate how schools socialize students differently depending on their social-economic status. This chapter also mentioned how schools that are private have their own privatized goals for their students.
I think this chapter is related to some of the ideas that were discussed in the “A talk to a teacher.” For example, he talked about how the purpose of education should be to help students learn to be critical thinkers, have literacy skills, be a thinker and a leader in society. And the author later stated that on the other hand “society really ideally wants a citizen which will simply obey the rules of society." I think the chapter demonstrates this idea because it explained that low-income students in their school are being trained to be docile workers. So maybe a barrier from preventing students from becoming great independent critical thinkers is the systemic barriers in society. In addition, I also think that privatization of education is one of those barriers that prevent students from becoming the type of thinkers that James Baldwin described because private schools have goals that align with their values, but these goals may not align with the community goals.
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with James Balwin statement? Why?
That is all for today, have a great day!!
I like this connection you made into another reading and I also heavily agree on us being products of our environment. Where I do think that my head kept going to was the fact that although we are products of our environment we also get to choose how the result turns out and up. I say this because I was a student from a lower class community going into a lower class public school. There was a lot of push for us to believe in ourselves to be good people but there was also a lot of low expectation. My brain goes straight to my high school experience and I think with resource and higher expectation there is always room for growth no matter the circumstance. It is society too though that plays a big role in this :/
ReplyDeleteI think it’s also important to mention that the household a child is raised in can heavily influence how they behave in classrooms and throughout society. In my family, I was always taught to listen to adults, teachers, and mentors, that they were the ones with all the information and that my role was to learn from them. Combined with a lecture based teaching style, that really shaped me into a “well behaved” and docile student. I also remember our discussions from Politics of Education, where we talked about how those docile workers are needed in society because they help maintain the systems put in place by those in power. Docile workers end up keeping those systems running, even though those same systems don’t allow them to become leaders themselves. So I definitely see the connection between both texts. We need to be critical in order to grow, learn, and become more confident in our own agency.
ReplyDeleteHi Emily, I believe the article you're referring to in this post is Jean Anyon's "Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work." One of my favorites, and such a great point of connection to James Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers." Both pieces acknowledge the ways in which schools operate as sites of social reproduction - and invite teachers to critically examine the conscious and unconscious messages we communicate to students about how the world functions and what kind of agency those students possess to create a more just society.
ReplyDeleteYou mention that "systemic barriers in society" might be "preventing students from becoming great independent critical thinkers." I would argue that a great deal of those "systemic barriers" lie in the education system itself - a system that rewards teaching discrete, operational skills (those skills that can be measured on a standardized test) at the expense of cultivating critical consciousness.
Hi Emily!
ReplyDeleteI really liked this! I was making the same connection. I also feel like every time I real James Baldwin's "A Talk to Teachers" it find me in a different point in my like and I take something else form it. As you mention, the impact in the methods in which a teacher operates can really impact a student and reinforce systematic oppression. I used to first say "yeah! Baldwin is telling us to really advocate for our education and be conscious of the oppression on a Freire kind of way" Now... I really took away his remarks of how teachers are at war with society. It amazes me over 60 years later this is true! I can't help to think that there has been no improvement since, perhaps the war seems more polarized and we added technology to the mix. It is crazy to think that as teachers we are tied to the standardization of student categorization yet we urge for the curriculum to be less about teaching students how to take a test and more about building their critical thinking
Thank you for sharing the connection you made while also adding a reference to your thought. I found that James Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers was truly engaging, as it offered me another perspective on the complexities of our world and the disparities in the education system today. If I may bring this back to my own context in my country, Indonesia, I find that economic and social disparities create larger gaps in education, creating tensions between private and public schools, schools with a lot better facilities in major cities and those schools in small, remote areas, or even schools in the main island, such as Java, and schools outside Java island far away in the eastern part of Indonesia. These tensions gradually accumulate, leaving students from lower-income families no choice but to go to free public schools in their neighborhoods with minimal facilities and spaces to nourish their critical thinking and consciousness. Reflecting on this, it is true that there are so many 'works' teachers need to deal with, and Baldwin's message resonates well in this era.
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