MASKED THE PLAY

Archive for June, 2010

We are called increasingly in the schools to see our world through a lens of economic competitiveness, the latest of the public imperatives. Today, the focus is on Japan and Germany, with countries such as Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Brazil close at hand. We need educational settings that fully challenge young people, that provide the skills and understandings that generate ongoing learning both in the schools and in the world. We must want for our children and young people, wherever they are, the best education we can imagine. But placing so much stress on economic competitiveness—stronger math and science programs to win the war of technology, for example—is distraction, even as it is distressingly accepted by schools of all kinds. It takes too much away from the students themselves, the immediacy of their educational interests and needs. In its extreme forms, this position looks beyond the students, right past them, as if they weren’t there. Moreover, such an approach too often prevents us from seeing the world as fully connected, its peoples having mutual needs, growth everywhere being something to rejoice about. And it also easily becomes too instrumental.

Searching for local services was never better these days because of the technology. With the use of the internet you can easily find for the services that you needed online. Services that you can ask for assistance for your home needs and for your business. If you live on Dallas Tx. You can now find for the easiest and fastest local search.
Where you can easily find for the category of the researchers. You can have the restaurant and the entertainment places. Or the car services which we do not known when we will be needing. Also the reliable Dallas Pawn Shops if time comes that you will be needing their assistance you can just have a visit on their site and even find the Austin Pawn Shops, see more services on their site and enjoy searching.

In relation to the human things, what if we spent time on the question, What do we most want our students to come to understand as a result of their schooling? “Reading and writing” might be a quick response, but is this enough? What if our students learn to read and write but don’t like to and don’t? What if they don’t read the newspapers and magazines, or can’t find beauty in a poem or love story? Don’t see some of Romeo and Juliet in their own lives? What if they don’t go as adults to artistic events, don’t listen to a broad range of music, aren’t optimistic about the world and their place in it, don’t notice the trees and the sunset, don’t look at the stars, are indifferent to older citizens, don’t participate in politics or community life, aren’t prepared for the responsibility of parenthood, don’t have a vision of themselves as thoughtful mothers and fathers, and are physically and psychologically abusive to themselves? And what if they can locate the Republic of South Africa but don’t know anything about apartheid and can’t feel the pain associated with it? Know about hunger, and collectively waste tons of food each day?

We are often asked about our purposes (though the word “goals” is more typically used). Yet we don’t often engage in serious discussion about purposes, those guiding principles that inform our teaching practices, curriculum patterns, organizational structures, and relationships with students and their parents. They are not fully enough within our consciousness as the source of our work. But they must be. When large purposes lose their centrality, schools tend to drift, forfeiting their independence and their educational and social power. I believe we know this intuitively, yet there is a reluctance to pursue serious questions about purposes. It may be that such discussions appear too philosophical, too abstract, too far removed from the daily tasks of schools. They needn’t be removed; such discussions are foundational, times to focus on first things.

The zero-sum formulations associated with competition— gains in Japan meaning necessary losses in the United States—are also self-defeating. Representing the world in these terms causes us to minimize the inequities that currently exist and the imperatives to work actively toward their redress. Is hunger in Africa acceptable? Is the burden of debt carried by Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Nigeria, and Poland their just due? Is that where competitiveness leads?
To speak of economic competitiveness in relation to the world also has an impact at the micro-level of the classroom. Must our goal in the schools also be rooted in a similar competition? Is that how we should define “getting ready for the real world”? Or can cooperation be a principal objective? What are some of the ways to think about this? Shall we, for example, track or not track students? Provide challenge for some and limits for others? Perpetuate inequities or work toward their eradication? Clutter our discourse with labels that pit students against each other, by race, or class, or perceptions of intelligence? Shall we accept the message of test scores or go beyond them? How many of us have seriously challenged the various ways schools separate students? Do we speak about the inequities in the world and ignore those that exist in our schools? In this regard, the inequities tend to be large—and they are growing larger.
We have more than enough to do to create for children and young people genuine communities of learning. Framing our work in terms of competition won’t help us do particularly well the first things, the human things.

What ought to guide us as we consider the schools in relation to large purposes? Very little of what I offer will be new, but possibly in the restating there will be some renewed basis for reflection and action in intellectual and moral rather than technical terms.
What we know most about children and young people is that they are always learning. That is their nature. As they touch the earth, observe the culture that surrounds them, listen to stories, and speak, they are achieving a personal relationship with the world, gaining what Jean Piaget calls a balance between changing the world and changing themselves.
If we kept such a view about children and young people constantly before us, we wouldn’t be so quick to assume clinical approaches to education, approaches so full of labels. We would put our energy into seeking our students’ strengths and not their deficits. Failing to begin with the natural strengths and energy of children and young people as our starting point is to limit the possibilities, to ensure an education with too little power. To paraphrase John Dewey, do we fit the child to the school or make the school fit the 0 child? It might be interesting to engage that question fully again and see where we are. I believe that schools almost everywhere have come to overshadow the child.

I ask often in this regard, are our children being provided a basis for active participation in the life of their communities? Do they understand the problems and the need to work toward solutions? Are they, in other words, learning the meaning of social responsibility, of citizenship?
If we aren’t clear about such questions, keeping them in mind with everything we do, making them a part of our ongoing discourse, we tend to fill our schools with contradictions—and these contradictions only foster cynicism and limited support, hardly the basis for making schools the centers for inquiry, authority, and change they need to be.
I’ll offer two vignettes that are related. I could present many more. You will have similar examples from which to draw, to raise to a fuller consciousness.

We often speak about children and young people in our society as “the future.” What do we imply by such a belief? Preservation, or change? Ensuring that children and young people can live in the world as it is, or ensuring the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that will enable them to change the world, to construct on their terms new possibilities? How we think about that will say a lot about what we do in our schools, the ideas we explore, the questions we raise, the books we read, the experiences we provide.
To raise such questions is, of course, to imply the need keep large hopes before us, to make use of a language and ideals that inspire us beyond our current practices. To those who worry about large hopes serving as guides (and I meet many who are concerned about this), I offer Alfred North Whitehead’s belief that “when ideals have sunk to the level of practice, the result is stagnation” (Whitehead, [1929] 1959). Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist and diplomat, phrased it differently but also powerfully: “We say justice, we say development, we say democracy. Words won’t bring them, but without the words, they will never exist” (Fuentes, 1986, p. 16). Not placing our work within this broader framework, not viewing it as a step toward fuller possibilities is to ensure that what we
will decline in its potency. Because I see this as such an important point, I offer several additional entries—essentially corroboration. Thomas Merton, for example, wrote: “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little” (in Mad lock, 1989, p. 13). And Anton Chekhov offered, “Man is what he believes” (in Mad lock, 1989,
14), a viewpoint that relates closely to Erich Heller’s often quoted statement: “Be careful how you define the world, it is like that” (Heller, 1959, p. 205). In a similar vein, Italo Calvino, one of the world’s best storytellers, wrote, “Literature remains alive only if
set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares to imagine will literature continue to have a function” (Calvino, 1988, p. i). In this sense, teachers need to be like these poets and writers.

In relation to the issue of large hopes, Jean Piaget argued that the principal goal of education in the schools should be the creation of “men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done—men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers . . . who can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered” Thomas Jefferson expressed a similar view
about the purposes of public education and life in American society, the understanding that each generation must establish its own revolution. And one can’t read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech without comprehending the same important point. Why shouldn’t the discourse in our schools be more consonant with such an inspiring spirit?

After the meal, once darkness had fallen, we westerners shuttled our precious literature from the van. ‘We carried it into the cabin as if we were bequeathing a fortune.
Marta expressed her gratitude as we left on that snowy January day. But if you come again, she said wistfully, please bring oranges. We haven’t had oranges for years.”
Marta’s request surprised us. Treasure may not look the same to all of us. But it is probably closer to what you’d find in the simplest of kitchens than in any other room—including a library of precious volumes.
I think of Marta whenever I eat oranges and hope that she can now get them by the bagful.
I brought Marta to mind when starting my own writing business out of my home and struggling to put food on the table. During this difficult period a telephone interview with a Christian personality turned out to be a challenge, but not because she was in any way ungracious. It was my own interior stuff with which I was at war. Doralyn Luca do, wife of author Max Luca do and a former missionary to Rio de Janeiro, had a lot to tell me—stories of life with children and what makes a house a home. The previous week her family had moved into what she called a French country farm- style home in Texas. There I was, a journalist listening to a tale of transition from a tough missionary existence to the good life in the United States, and I was the one who had the problem.