Takeaway(s): These are meant to be the big ideas you “took away”

Takeaway(s): These are meant to be the big ideas you “took away” from the past week’s discussion, something like this: When we hear politicians and pundits talk about education today, the case for going to school tends to build on the “human capital” model: the idea that students should attend school to learn marketable skills that they will then take out into the workforce to earn their living. Our readings for Week 1 showed how scholars have considered and challenged this idea and, more broadly, how they have analyzed the purpose of schooling, both historically and in the present. Rather than offer simple answers to this question, our readings this week showed us how to approach it. Mike Rose focused on individuals as students and workers, and challenged us to to explore how we know what we know about intelligence and ability in school and on the job. David Labaree wrote that “education may not be doing what we ask, but it is doing what we want,” in response to the observation that Americans have historically asked schools to solve social problems even when it is clear that these problems are much bigger than anything schooling can do to address them. Finally, Bowles and Gintis flip the script, and argue that societal transformation must preceed a transformation of schooling. 

Connection(s): This section is where you put this week’s reading and discussion into conversation with what we’ve done in previous weeks. This was the first week, but as I’m writing in Week 2, it’s clear from reading Katz and Kaestle that Bowles and Gintis were on to something when they wrote “Schools and colleges do indeed help to justify inequality, but they have also become arenas in which a highly politicized egalitarian consciousness has developed” (12). Schools, in other words, are sites of struggle, including forms of class struggle, and while they often reflect the dominant ideology of the elite (in their organization, as Katz shows, as well as in their curriculum, as Kaestle argues), they are not merely instruments of the ruling class. This tension — Bowles and Gintis call it a paradox — comes up again and again in our course.

Question(s): These questions can take two forms. You can ask specific questions you have about the past week’s readings or classes; for example, something as specific as “what does Labaree mean by ‘formalism’?” You can also pose general questions that occur to you while you’re reading or taking part in class disucssions, which can be very content-focused (something like “Why did Katz and Kaestle disagree so strongly for so many years?) or something more open-ended (“What would Mike Rose think about AI?”). Unlike your presentations, when I’m asking you all to pose discussion questions to one another, here, I’m genuinely curious to know what you’re thinking about after a week of reading and discussion.