Editor: Here is a slightly different version of our post below about Bill Ayers. In it, he asks followers to sign and forward a petition to President Obama. In it he recommends that the President appoint Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of State. The petition currently has 810 signatures. A link follows the post.
Argues Ayers:
It is time to set American education on that course, and a strong step in that direction would be appointing Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. A teacher and recognized scholar/researcher for decades, Dr.Darling-Hammond will not be swayed by big money or political expediency or the latest fads. She will be independent, professional and principled. We can then return to the precious but fragile ideal that must power education in a democracy: Every human being is of incalculable value, and the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each.
Here is the full version:
President Obama: Replace Arne Duncan with Linda Darling-Hammond
By Bill Ayers
Dear Mr. President:
You and Secretary Arne Duncan-endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits-now bear a major responsibility for a toxic agenda of "school reform."
The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united "school reform" agenda are these:
1) turning over public assets and spaces to private management;
2) dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and
3) reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score.
While there's absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed. Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education:
It's one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.
Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).
In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Every child deserves the type of education your children receive.
It is time to set American education on that course, and a strong step in that direction would be appointing Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. A teacher and recognized scholar/researcher for decades, Dr.
Darling-Hammond will not be swayed by big money or political expediency or the latest fads. She will be independent, professional and principled. We can then return to the precious but fragile ideal that must power education in a democracy: Every human being is of incalculable value, and the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each.
That's why I created a petition to President Barack Obama, which says:
"Mr. President: Prove your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background. Fire Arne Duncan and appoint Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education. "
Will you sign my petition? Click here to add your name:
http://signon.org/sign/president-obama-replace-1?source=c.fwd
http://signon.org/sign/president-obama-replace-1?source=c.fwd&r_by=4535475&r_by=4535475
Thanks!
William Ayers
Showing posts with label Bill Ayers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Ayers. Show all posts
Monday, November 19, 2012
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Bill Ayers’ Open Letter to President Obama
Editor: Readers will remember an article in an earlier issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy by Bill Ayers, entitled, “Singing in Dark Times.” The letter below has been circulating on the web with requests to interested readers to forward it on to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In his critique of the administration's direction for educational reform, Ayers points out three areas that have become particularly toxic and destructive for an education required for sustaining democratic life.
Writes Ayers:
Dear President Obama: Congratulations!
I’m sure this is a moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate, regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.
The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.
Whether inept or clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that agenda.
The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score. While there’s absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed—fact-free, faith-based reform at its core, resting firmly on rank ideology rather than any evidence whatsoever.
The three pillars of this agenda are nested in a seductive but wholly inaccurate metaphor: Education is a commodity like any other—a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver—that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Within this controlling metaphor the schoolhouse is assumed to be a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads.
It’s rather easy to begin to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and “privatizing” a space that was once public, is a natural event. Teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes” (winners and losers) becomes a rational proxy for learning; “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior turns out to be a stand-in for child development or justice; and a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials (they call it “accountability")—is logical and level-headed.
I urge you to resist these policies and reject the dominant metaphor as wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral.
Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. Further, while schooling in every totalitarian society on earth foregrounds obedience and conformity, education in a democracy emphasizes initiative, courage, imagination, and entrepreneurship in order to encourage students to develop minds of their own.
When the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it. People are turned against one another as every difference becomes a potential deficit. Getting ahead is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned. It’s no wonder that cheating scandals are rampant in our country and fraudulent claims are commonplace.
Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education as the Secretary of Education begins to look and act like a program officer for some charity rather than the leading educator for all children: It’s one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.
You have opposed privatizing social security, pointing out the terrible risks the market would impose on seniors if the voucher plan were ever adopted. And yet you’ve supported—in effect—putting the most endangered young people at risk through a similar scheme. We need to expand, deepen, and fortify the public space, especially for the most vulnerable, not turn it over to private managers. The current gold rush of for-profit colleges gobbling up student loans is but one cautionary tale.
You’ve said that you defend working people and their right to organize and yet you have publicly and noisily maligned teachers and their unions on several occasions. You need to consider that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions. We can’t have the best learning conditions if teachers are forced away from the table, or if the teaching corps is reduced to a team of short-termers and school tourists.
You have declared your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background, and yet your policies rely on a relentless regimen of standardized testing, and test scores as the sole measure of progress.
You should certainly pause and reconsider. What’s done is done, but you can demonstrate wisdom and true leadership if you pull back now and correct these dreadful mistakes.
In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).
Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”
Sincerely,
William Ayers
Writes Ayers:
The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score.We thought our readers would be interested in reading Professor Ayers’ most recent post.
An Open Letter to President Obama from Bill Ayers
By William Ayers
Dear President Obama: Congratulations!
I’m sure this is a moment you want to savor, a time to take a deep breath, get some rest, hydrate, regain your balance, and take a long walk in the sunshine. It might be as well a good time to reflect, rethink, recharge, and perhaps reignite. I sincerely hope that it is, and I urge you to put education on your reflective agenda.
The landscape of “educational reform” is currently littered with rubble and ruin and wreckage on all sides. Sadly, your administration has contributed significantly to the mounting catastrophe. You’re not alone: The toxic materials have been assembled as a bipartisan endeavor over many years, and the efforts of the last several administrations are now organized into a coherent push mobilized and led by a merry band of billionaires including Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Walton, and Eli Broad.
Whether inept or clueless or malevolent—who’s to say?—these titans have worked relentlessly to take up all the available space, preaching, persuading, promoting, and, when all else fails, spreading around massive amounts of cash to promote their particular brand of school change as common sense. You and Secretary Arne Duncan—endorsed in your efforts by Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and a host of reactionary politicians and pundits—now bear a major responsibility for that agenda.
The three most trumpeted and simultaneously most destructive aspects of the united “school reform” agenda are these: turning over public assets and spaces to private management; dismantling and opposing any independent, collective voice of teachers; and reducing education to a single narrow metric that claims to recognize an educated person through a test score. While there’s absolutely no substantive proof that this approach improves schooling for children, it chugs along unfazed—fact-free, faith-based reform at its core, resting firmly on rank ideology rather than any evidence whatsoever.
The three pillars of this agenda are nested in a seductive but wholly inaccurate metaphor: Education is a commodity like any other—a car or a refrigerator, a box of bolts or a screwdriver—that is bought and sold in the marketplace. Within this controlling metaphor the schoolhouse is assumed to be a business run by a CEO, with teachers as workers and students as the raw material bumping along the assembly line while information is incrementally stuffed into their little up-turned heads.
It’s rather easy to begin to think that “downsizing” the least productive units, “outsourcing” and “privatizing” a space that was once public, is a natural event. Teaching toward a simple standardized measure and relentlessly applying state-administered (but privately developed and quite profitable) tests to determine the “outcomes” (winners and losers) becomes a rational proxy for learning; “zero tolerance” for student misbehavior turns out to be a stand-in for child development or justice; and a range of sanctions on students, teachers, and schools—but never on lawmakers, foundations, corporations, or high officials (they call it “accountability")—is logical and level-headed.
I urge you to resist these policies and reject the dominant metaphor as wrong in the sense of inaccurate as well as wrong in the sense of immoral.
Education is a fundamental human right, not a product. In a free society education is based on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being; it’s constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and, conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all. Further, while schooling in every totalitarian society on earth foregrounds obedience and conformity, education in a democracy emphasizes initiative, courage, imagination, and entrepreneurship in order to encourage students to develop minds of their own.
When the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it. People are turned against one another as every difference becomes a potential deficit. Getting ahead is the primary goal in such places, and mutual assistance, which can be so natural in other human affairs, is severely restricted or banned. It’s no wonder that cheating scandals are rampant in our country and fraudulent claims are commonplace.
Race to the Top is but one example of incentivizing bad behavior and backward ideas about education as the Secretary of Education begins to look and act like a program officer for some charity rather than the leading educator for all children: It’s one state against another, this school against that one, and my second grade in fierce competition with the second grade across the hall.
You have opposed privatizing social security, pointing out the terrible risks the market would impose on seniors if the voucher plan were ever adopted. And yet you’ve supported—in effect—putting the most endangered young people at risk through a similar scheme. We need to expand, deepen, and fortify the public space, especially for the most vulnerable, not turn it over to private managers. The current gold rush of for-profit colleges gobbling up student loans is but one cautionary tale.
You’ve said that you defend working people and their right to organize and yet you have publicly and noisily maligned teachers and their unions on several occasions. You need to consider that good working conditions are good teaching conditions, and that good teaching conditions are good learning conditions. We can’t have the best learning conditions if teachers are forced away from the table, or if the teaching corps is reduced to a team of short-termers and school tourists.
You have declared your support for a deep and rich curriculum for all students regardless of circumstance or background, and yet your policies rely on a relentless regimen of standardized testing, and test scores as the sole measure of progress.
You should certainly pause and reconsider. What’s done is done, but you can demonstrate wisdom and true leadership if you pull back now and correct these dreadful mistakes.
In a vibrant democracy, whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children. Arne Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (as did our three sons); you sent your kids to Lab, and so did your friend Rahm Emanuel. There students found small classes, abundant resources, and opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the far limits, and a minimum of time-out for standardized testing. They found, as well, a respected and unionized teacher corps, people who were committed to a life-long career in teaching and who were encouraged to work cooperatively for their mutual benefit (and who never would settle for being judged, assessed, rewarded, or punished based on student test scores).
Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere—a standard to be aspired to and worked toward. Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”
Sincerely,
William Ayers
Monday, October 4, 2010
Time for a Serious National Conversation on the Public Purposes of our Schools: An Interview with Bill Ayers
Readers will find the interview with Bill Ayers from Truthout.org an interesting departure from the mainsteam media's superficial coverage of our national debate on school reform. We reprint it in its entirety with permission from Truthout.org. In his interview, Ayers talks about the public purposes of schooling -- something often left out of the economic and privatized goals that have dominated the national debate -- and the real social and human conditions that need to be addressed. For readers who would like to read the article we published by Bill Ayers in our special issue on "Schooling as if Democracy Matters," go to: "Singing in Dark Times."
Back to School: An Interview With Bill Ayers
Friday 01 October 2010
by: Maya Schenwar, Executive Director, t r u t h o u t Interview
Reprinted by permission from Truthout.org
As the 2010-2011 school year grumbled to a start - and millions of public school students settled into overcrowded, underfunded, under-resourced classrooms - I sat down in Chicago with education theorist and activist Bill Ayers to discuss true democracy, false reform and his latest book (co-authored with cartoonist Ryan Alexander-Tanner), "To Teach: The Journey in Comics." In an educational culture increasingly permeated by top-down marketplace values, Ayers, who taught primary school for years, still believes in the possibility of a schooliverse where every teacher is respected and every student is valued as a full human being, where collaborative learning and growth trump the school-eat-school "Race to the Top." And by the end of our conversation, I did, too.
Maya Schenwar: In "To Teach," you talk about how a good school is defined by good teachers. What do you think of this practice that's been circling the country, of "reconstituting" schools and firing all the teachers? Does that logic work?
Bill Ayers: Not at all - not even close.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
C.A. Bowers critiques Bill Ayers' book on Social Justice Education
Editor: Both C.A. Bowers and Bill Ayers have written articles for the Journal of Educational Controversy in the past. Among other things, this blog is a forum for authors to continue the conversations started in the journal. Below Chet reviews Bill Ayers book, The Handbook on Social Justice in Education.
Is It Relevant as a Guide for Understanding Social Justice Issues in the Twenty-First Century? A Critique of the Handbook on Social Justice Education
Author: C. A. Bowers
The Handbook on Social Justice in Education, edited by William Ayers, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall was so highly regarded that the reference librarian at the University of Oregon placed it in a special collection out of a concern that it may be lost or damaged if allowed to be taken out of the library. As I read through the many aspects of social justice issues to be addressed by educators, which range widely from historical perspectives to the continuing challenges in the areas of race, gender, disabilities, and globalization, I was struck by how dated the collection of well-intentioned essays had already become. Perhaps the reference librarian was unaware that the Handbook would perpetuate the silences that characterize the last 30 or so years of thinking about how teacher educators should address social justice issues. There are some books that never become dated, such as Eric Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write (1986), Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation (2002 edition), and Daniel Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1997). Other books, including many that address changes occurring in the world’s ecosystems, quickly become dated as their authors either continue to remain silent about the ecological crisis or write about environmental changes and their impacts on cultures that are quickly surpassed by more recent changes.
Books by educational reformers that fail to acknowledge that the ecological crisis is altering the prospects of humanity in fundamental ways cease to be useful guides for how to address the new injustices that are being magnified by recent environmental changes. Their usefulness is not only limited, but becomes part of the mis-education that students encounter in other university courses that fail to address the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. But the Handbook suggests another failure. Namely, it serves as evidence of the failure of educational theorists to break out of their mutual quoting circles that share the same silences. Unfortunately, many graduate students are likely to be encouraged to consider the Handbook as a primary scholarly resource that should guide their thinking, which would again lead to reproducing the silences and misconceptions their professors learned to take-for-granted in their own years of graduate study. These may seem like overly harsh criticisms of the editors and the contributors of what must have been initially viewed as an important contribution to overcoming social injustices in society. As scientists are warning that we may have as little as a couple of decades before global warming can no longer be slowed, and as we are already witnessing with the collapse of local ecosystems the suffering and deaths of millions of people, it’s time that educational theorists be held accountable for not rethinking the orthodoxies that now make their prescriptions for addressing social justice issues so dated.
My criticisms are not directed at such sensible recommendations as hiring faculty that are representative of a multicultural society, or at the need to incorporate into the curriculum awareness of the range of social injustices—ranging from race, gender, poverty, etc., or for the need for students to learn about the systemic roots of these forms of injustice. Rather, my criticisms fall into three different categories.
First, This 774 page tome has only one reference to “ecological analysis”, and it focuses on patterns of human interaction--and not on the cultural and natural system ecologies. And the phrase “ecological crisis” appears in one sentence along with the usual list of unresolved social problems. Given that even Wal-Mart as well as other major contributors to a hyper- consumer, toxic producing lifestyle are attempting to lighten their ecological footprint, and the plethora of books addressing both the nature of the ecological crisis and ways that local communities are working to recover their traditions of mutual support and self-reliance, the reader might expect that social justice issues might be understood in a more current way. There is now a huge literature on the impact of water shortages being experienced as a result of climate change, and it would seem that this would be a critical social justice issue. In the United States alone, twenty percent of the population does not have access to clean water. World-wide, there are more people dying from the lack of potable water than are being killed in current wars. The range of toxins that are affecting the development of children, as well as the range of illnesses experienced throughout society from the thousands of synthetic chemicals used in the manufacturing process, have been the focus of attention since Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (now in its 27th edition), and the first Earth Day held in 1970. Climate change is now recognized as responsible for the melting of ice fields that are the source of water for hundreds of millions of people, as well as the droughts that are forcing people to become environmental refugees. The regions of the United States experiencing serious droughts in the last few years are contributing to unemployment, changes in diets, and a further decline into poverty. The evidence has been available in responsible media that social injustices will expand exponentially if one considers the implications of the changes occurring in just one area of ecological degradation. Scientists, for example, are documenting that the chemistry of the world’s oceans is becoming more acidic and is having an adverse impact on the bottom of the ocean food chain upon which the fish stocks humans rely upon depend. This, combined with over-fishing, has already led to the collapse of major fisheries in different regions of the world. If the shortage of fresh water does not lead to international conflicts, the lack of ocean sources of protein will.
One has to ask why these well-publicized changes have escaped the attention of the contributors to the Handbook. If they had given any thought to the social justice issues that have been the focus of a wide range of national and international organizations, one might have expected a radical reconceptualization of the social justice issues that can be traced directly to the globalization of the western model of development. These are issues related to actual homelessness, disease, death, hunger, and the refugee status of millions that involves the loss of the ability to achieve one’s most basic potential as a human being. How does one explain the silence on the part of the contributors to the Handbook? One possible explanation can be found in the long list of books cited at the end of each chapter. Most of the citations refer to articles and books written by colleagues in the field who share a similar educational background. There are few books cited written by environmentalists, by scientists concerned with how our bodies and environments are being poisoned by our industrial/consumer oriented lifestyle, and by community activists.
Second: While the Handbook includes recommendations for achieving social justice in nine areas, the failure to address how the ecological crisis, as well as the impact of economic globalization, are expanding the list of social injustices experienced by the majority of the world’s population, leads to an excessive amount of repetition. References to the contributions and failures of past approaches to multicultural education, to the need to foster critical thinking and a transformative lifestyle, to anti-biases in curriculum materials and pedagogy, and to the need to create positive learning environments, are important. But the repetitiveness of these recommendations does not help the reader obtain an understanding of the curricular changes that can help alleviate the scale of poverty, and will provide the conceptual basis for exercising communicative competency in resisting the further commodification and monetizing of the local cultural and environmental commons that is a major contributor to poverty. Again, the contributors rely upon the formulaic prescriptions of the late twentieth century, which include more critical thinking, more concern about the plight of social groups and individuals who face a myriad forms of injustice. But the prescriptions do not translate into recommendations for how individual and community gardens can be promoted, how traditional technologies for preserving food can be intergenerationally passed along, how volunteerism and mentoring in a wide range of non monetized and mutually supportive activities can be promoted, and how to enable students to recognize the differences between their experiences in the cultural commons and market-oriented sub-cultures that will lead to the development of the communicative competence necessary for resisting the further enclosure of what remains of their non-monetized lives.
With the spread of economic globalization, colonization to a western individualistic/consumer oriented lifestyle, and the unrelenting quest for new technologies and markets, one of the dominant features of the future will be scarcity—in access to protein, to potable water and water for agriculture, to sources of a dignified and community supporting livelihood, and to the intergenerational knowledge that has enabled many cultures to achieve a degree of self-reliance without destroying the bioregions they were dependent upon. The double bind the world is now facing is that the emphasis on material progress is leading to more forms of scarcity—including the loss of intergenerational knowledge and skills that enable people to live less consumer dependent lives.
Several contributors focus on the systemic causes of social injustices, and suggest that students should be engaged in a discussion of how to bring about needed changes. However, what they miss is that students should also be encouraged to engage in auto-ethnographies of their local communities in order to identify the forms of intergenerational knowledge and skill that need to be renewed. Indeed, the possibility that critical inquiry should also lead to an awareness of what should be conserved goes unrecognized by the contributors to the Handbook. Traditions such as the gains in civil liberties, as well as recent achievements by the labor, civil rights, feminist, and now environmental movements—all essential to addressing unresolved social justice issues—need to be part of the curriculum. Passing this knowledge on to the next generation is part of the process of conserving important social justice gains. Social justice education, contrary to the impression left by some of the contributors, should not represent all traditions as being the source of oppressive. The legacy of previous social justice struggles should be part of the collective memory, as it provides evidence of the importance of collective action focused on the common good—a value that is increasingly being marginalized in our consumer and technologically addicted culture.
Third: Since both the students who are victims of social injustice, as well as those who will dedicate their lives to improving the prospects of others, will encounter mostly a middle class, consumer-oriented curriculum that may include shallow introductions to the cultures of minority groups, the following questions arise: Do the contributors to the Handbook provide guidance for recognizing how to reframe the analogs that are encoded in the vocabulary that students encounter in most areas of the curriculum? Will readers of the Handbook be able to recognize how the vocabulary in the curriculum serves as a form of linguistic colonization of the present by past thinkers who were unaware of environmental limits? Granted, social justice-oriented educators are more likely to be aware of the linguistic colonization that goes on in multicultural classrooms. But they are unlikely to be aware of the history of the analogs that frame the meaning of words in the curriculum they take-for-granted, such as “individualism”, “progress”, “traditions”, “ecology”, and so forth. Introducing students to the fact that words have a history would seem especially critical in a social justice-oriented curriculum—and there was no mention of this in the Handbook.
Nor is there any discussion of how to introduce students to the many ways in which the idea of individual intelligence is problematic—for ecological, cultural, and moral reasons. It would seem that if the contributors spent less time reading the writings of their professors and colleagues who share the same silences and historically rooted misconceptions, they might be able to focus on how to introduce their students to the many cultural alternatives that serve as evidence that intelligence is not an attribute of the autonomous individual. That is, they might understand how to introduce students to the limited ways they already exercise what can be called ecological intelligence—and the problems that arise in the students’ interpersonal relationships when they assume that the preconceived prejudices, ideas, and judgments they act upon are based on their own perceptions of reality. That is, when they ignore the differences which make a difference in their ongoing relationships with other students, parents, others in society—and in their relations with the other participants in the local and global ecological systems they are part of, their sense of being an autonomous individual (which was promoted in different ways both by Rene Descartes and by many current educational reformers) cannot help but promote further social injustice. There are many non-western examples of how the exercise of ecological intelligence fosters mutually supportive community relationships as well as how to live in more ecologically sustainable ways, but the question to be asked of social justice educators is: How do we begin to help students make the transition to exercising in a more conscious way their ecological intelligence? Somewhere in the 774 pages of the Handbook this question should have been raised, particularly since one of the major contributors to the many forms of social injustice that exist in American society is the lack of awareness of how the hyper-subjective sense of individualism and entitlement marginalizes an awareness of how one’s actions adversely impact others, including cultural groups.
Hopefully, the Handbook will be viewed by educational historians as a well-intentioned effort of educational reformers who are out of touch with the dominant realities of their times. And hopefully, these historians will possess the conceptual ability to explain the linguistic reasons that one generation that has been colonized by many previous generations succeeds in colonizing the next generations. This hope should not be interpreted as giving support to Paulo Freire's universal recommendation that each generation should rename the reality of the previous generation. The process of linguistic colonization is far more complex than he understood or his followers understand today. But this is another story—and another potential source of misunderstanding.
________________________________________________________________
Is It Relevant as a Guide for Understanding Social Justice Issues in the Twenty-First Century? A Critique of the Handbook on Social Justice Education
Author: C. A. Bowers
The Handbook on Social Justice in Education, edited by William Ayers, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall was so highly regarded that the reference librarian at the University of Oregon placed it in a special collection out of a concern that it may be lost or damaged if allowed to be taken out of the library. As I read through the many aspects of social justice issues to be addressed by educators, which range widely from historical perspectives to the continuing challenges in the areas of race, gender, disabilities, and globalization, I was struck by how dated the collection of well-intentioned essays had already become. Perhaps the reference librarian was unaware that the Handbook would perpetuate the silences that characterize the last 30 or so years of thinking about how teacher educators should address social justice issues. There are some books that never become dated, such as Eric Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write (1986), Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation (2002 edition), and Daniel Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1997). Other books, including many that address changes occurring in the world’s ecosystems, quickly become dated as their authors either continue to remain silent about the ecological crisis or write about environmental changes and their impacts on cultures that are quickly surpassed by more recent changes.
Books by educational reformers that fail to acknowledge that the ecological crisis is altering the prospects of humanity in fundamental ways cease to be useful guides for how to address the new injustices that are being magnified by recent environmental changes. Their usefulness is not only limited, but becomes part of the mis-education that students encounter in other university courses that fail to address the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. But the Handbook suggests another failure. Namely, it serves as evidence of the failure of educational theorists to break out of their mutual quoting circles that share the same silences. Unfortunately, many graduate students are likely to be encouraged to consider the Handbook as a primary scholarly resource that should guide their thinking, which would again lead to reproducing the silences and misconceptions their professors learned to take-for-granted in their own years of graduate study. These may seem like overly harsh criticisms of the editors and the contributors of what must have been initially viewed as an important contribution to overcoming social injustices in society. As scientists are warning that we may have as little as a couple of decades before global warming can no longer be slowed, and as we are already witnessing with the collapse of local ecosystems the suffering and deaths of millions of people, it’s time that educational theorists be held accountable for not rethinking the orthodoxies that now make their prescriptions for addressing social justice issues so dated.
My criticisms are not directed at such sensible recommendations as hiring faculty that are representative of a multicultural society, or at the need to incorporate into the curriculum awareness of the range of social injustices—ranging from race, gender, poverty, etc., or for the need for students to learn about the systemic roots of these forms of injustice. Rather, my criticisms fall into three different categories.
First, This 774 page tome has only one reference to “ecological analysis”, and it focuses on patterns of human interaction--and not on the cultural and natural system ecologies. And the phrase “ecological crisis” appears in one sentence along with the usual list of unresolved social problems. Given that even Wal-Mart as well as other major contributors to a hyper- consumer, toxic producing lifestyle are attempting to lighten their ecological footprint, and the plethora of books addressing both the nature of the ecological crisis and ways that local communities are working to recover their traditions of mutual support and self-reliance, the reader might expect that social justice issues might be understood in a more current way. There is now a huge literature on the impact of water shortages being experienced as a result of climate change, and it would seem that this would be a critical social justice issue. In the United States alone, twenty percent of the population does not have access to clean water. World-wide, there are more people dying from the lack of potable water than are being killed in current wars. The range of toxins that are affecting the development of children, as well as the range of illnesses experienced throughout society from the thousands of synthetic chemicals used in the manufacturing process, have been the focus of attention since Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (now in its 27th edition), and the first Earth Day held in 1970. Climate change is now recognized as responsible for the melting of ice fields that are the source of water for hundreds of millions of people, as well as the droughts that are forcing people to become environmental refugees. The regions of the United States experiencing serious droughts in the last few years are contributing to unemployment, changes in diets, and a further decline into poverty. The evidence has been available in responsible media that social injustices will expand exponentially if one considers the implications of the changes occurring in just one area of ecological degradation. Scientists, for example, are documenting that the chemistry of the world’s oceans is becoming more acidic and is having an adverse impact on the bottom of the ocean food chain upon which the fish stocks humans rely upon depend. This, combined with over-fishing, has already led to the collapse of major fisheries in different regions of the world. If the shortage of fresh water does not lead to international conflicts, the lack of ocean sources of protein will.
One has to ask why these well-publicized changes have escaped the attention of the contributors to the Handbook. If they had given any thought to the social justice issues that have been the focus of a wide range of national and international organizations, one might have expected a radical reconceptualization of the social justice issues that can be traced directly to the globalization of the western model of development. These are issues related to actual homelessness, disease, death, hunger, and the refugee status of millions that involves the loss of the ability to achieve one’s most basic potential as a human being. How does one explain the silence on the part of the contributors to the Handbook? One possible explanation can be found in the long list of books cited at the end of each chapter. Most of the citations refer to articles and books written by colleagues in the field who share a similar educational background. There are few books cited written by environmentalists, by scientists concerned with how our bodies and environments are being poisoned by our industrial/consumer oriented lifestyle, and by community activists.
Second: While the Handbook includes recommendations for achieving social justice in nine areas, the failure to address how the ecological crisis, as well as the impact of economic globalization, are expanding the list of social injustices experienced by the majority of the world’s population, leads to an excessive amount of repetition. References to the contributions and failures of past approaches to multicultural education, to the need to foster critical thinking and a transformative lifestyle, to anti-biases in curriculum materials and pedagogy, and to the need to create positive learning environments, are important. But the repetitiveness of these recommendations does not help the reader obtain an understanding of the curricular changes that can help alleviate the scale of poverty, and will provide the conceptual basis for exercising communicative competency in resisting the further commodification and monetizing of the local cultural and environmental commons that is a major contributor to poverty. Again, the contributors rely upon the formulaic prescriptions of the late twentieth century, which include more critical thinking, more concern about the plight of social groups and individuals who face a myriad forms of injustice. But the prescriptions do not translate into recommendations for how individual and community gardens can be promoted, how traditional technologies for preserving food can be intergenerationally passed along, how volunteerism and mentoring in a wide range of non monetized and mutually supportive activities can be promoted, and how to enable students to recognize the differences between their experiences in the cultural commons and market-oriented sub-cultures that will lead to the development of the communicative competence necessary for resisting the further enclosure of what remains of their non-monetized lives.
With the spread of economic globalization, colonization to a western individualistic/consumer oriented lifestyle, and the unrelenting quest for new technologies and markets, one of the dominant features of the future will be scarcity—in access to protein, to potable water and water for agriculture, to sources of a dignified and community supporting livelihood, and to the intergenerational knowledge that has enabled many cultures to achieve a degree of self-reliance without destroying the bioregions they were dependent upon. The double bind the world is now facing is that the emphasis on material progress is leading to more forms of scarcity—including the loss of intergenerational knowledge and skills that enable people to live less consumer dependent lives.
Several contributors focus on the systemic causes of social injustices, and suggest that students should be engaged in a discussion of how to bring about needed changes. However, what they miss is that students should also be encouraged to engage in auto-ethnographies of their local communities in order to identify the forms of intergenerational knowledge and skill that need to be renewed. Indeed, the possibility that critical inquiry should also lead to an awareness of what should be conserved goes unrecognized by the contributors to the Handbook. Traditions such as the gains in civil liberties, as well as recent achievements by the labor, civil rights, feminist, and now environmental movements—all essential to addressing unresolved social justice issues—need to be part of the curriculum. Passing this knowledge on to the next generation is part of the process of conserving important social justice gains. Social justice education, contrary to the impression left by some of the contributors, should not represent all traditions as being the source of oppressive. The legacy of previous social justice struggles should be part of the collective memory, as it provides evidence of the importance of collective action focused on the common good—a value that is increasingly being marginalized in our consumer and technologically addicted culture.
Third: Since both the students who are victims of social injustice, as well as those who will dedicate their lives to improving the prospects of others, will encounter mostly a middle class, consumer-oriented curriculum that may include shallow introductions to the cultures of minority groups, the following questions arise: Do the contributors to the Handbook provide guidance for recognizing how to reframe the analogs that are encoded in the vocabulary that students encounter in most areas of the curriculum? Will readers of the Handbook be able to recognize how the vocabulary in the curriculum serves as a form of linguistic colonization of the present by past thinkers who were unaware of environmental limits? Granted, social justice-oriented educators are more likely to be aware of the linguistic colonization that goes on in multicultural classrooms. But they are unlikely to be aware of the history of the analogs that frame the meaning of words in the curriculum they take-for-granted, such as “individualism”, “progress”, “traditions”, “ecology”, and so forth. Introducing students to the fact that words have a history would seem especially critical in a social justice-oriented curriculum—and there was no mention of this in the Handbook.
Nor is there any discussion of how to introduce students to the many ways in which the idea of individual intelligence is problematic—for ecological, cultural, and moral reasons. It would seem that if the contributors spent less time reading the writings of their professors and colleagues who share the same silences and historically rooted misconceptions, they might be able to focus on how to introduce their students to the many cultural alternatives that serve as evidence that intelligence is not an attribute of the autonomous individual. That is, they might understand how to introduce students to the limited ways they already exercise what can be called ecological intelligence—and the problems that arise in the students’ interpersonal relationships when they assume that the preconceived prejudices, ideas, and judgments they act upon are based on their own perceptions of reality. That is, when they ignore the differences which make a difference in their ongoing relationships with other students, parents, others in society—and in their relations with the other participants in the local and global ecological systems they are part of, their sense of being an autonomous individual (which was promoted in different ways both by Rene Descartes and by many current educational reformers) cannot help but promote further social injustice. There are many non-western examples of how the exercise of ecological intelligence fosters mutually supportive community relationships as well as how to live in more ecologically sustainable ways, but the question to be asked of social justice educators is: How do we begin to help students make the transition to exercising in a more conscious way their ecological intelligence? Somewhere in the 774 pages of the Handbook this question should have been raised, particularly since one of the major contributors to the many forms of social injustice that exist in American society is the lack of awareness of how the hyper-subjective sense of individualism and entitlement marginalizes an awareness of how one’s actions adversely impact others, including cultural groups.
Hopefully, the Handbook will be viewed by educational historians as a well-intentioned effort of educational reformers who are out of touch with the dominant realities of their times. And hopefully, these historians will possess the conceptual ability to explain the linguistic reasons that one generation that has been colonized by many previous generations succeeds in colonizing the next generations. This hope should not be interpreted as giving support to Paulo Freire's universal recommendation that each generation should rename the reality of the previous generation. The process of linguistic colonization is far more complex than he understood or his followers understand today. But this is another story—and another potential source of misunderstanding.
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