Author Archives: Benjamin Seidman

In this chapter that discusses the troubling transformations of teacher unions over time, teacher representation goes under harsh challenges. Their profession is devalued and sexist against the dominantly female work force in education. From my perspective, if there is any job that needs a union it is the teachers because their job has so many variables. They work with others all day long, in school environments which differ vastly. Teachers should be made safe and their conditions comfortable for the services they provide in educating the youth.

Someone has to have the job of forming a child’s brain and we have professionals who are trained to do it. Teachers should not be held accountable for this. Someone needs to do it. Truckers create road kill but they have a highly supported union because everyone knows that that stuff happens. Teacher’s doings come under a microscope when they are with our children all the time. What needs to happen is to separate the issues. Yes, they are with our developing children everyday, but their objectives are only positive, for the most part. This must be taken into consideration before heinous accusations are made. Children are fickle. The nature of the job should have been taken into account before making rash judgments and decisions.

I found that standardizing poses both pros and cons to our current educational system. The idea of equal opportunity is important and something that gives lower-class students with high testing abilities a way to escape the lower rungs of society. However, there cannot be a true correlation between standardized testing and vocational purposes. Many jobs in America require street smarts in addition to book smarts. The standardized testing movement allows us to use technology to decide who are better learners and who should go to the better schools, effectively get better jobs and make that much more money. At such a young age, it is hard to depend on these types of tests to separate our youth. Many students are diagnosed with ADD, attention deficit disorder, which impairs their concentration during testing. If there should be some sort of test to divide the intellect of our American students, it should not be with just one test. Maybe students should have to perform real tasks, vocationally, like they would in their real job. I work with people who never finished high school yet they know the system better than me even though I’m the one in college. What is our education system really about? Separating our kids into groups based on how well they did on a test? It is not that simple.

The advent of extracurriculars and activities that were economically driven was a breakthrough for American schooling. For the first time there was a common thought that for our economic system to flourish, first our education system must prepare out youngest generation for the future, whether it be vocationally or be setting up programs to train our youngest in these practices.

While there were a lot of benefits from this, I think that this can somehow diminish the potential of an individual. If you put a hammer in an adolescents hand and teach him to build a house, he will want to be a smith, a builder of some sort. But this same person has not made his own choice. Meaning, we should not sway the ambition of children for our countries economic needs. They should fall into the craft in which they desire, not that which they are placed.

I am not proclaiming that teaching children skills is a negative, only that we must be careful. Careful that the child learning to sew rugs might not also be a great businessman/woman some day. Or that the gardener could not also be a great school principal. It is important to let a human find themselves and not force them into one profession for the selfishness of a government’s economic development.

The conclusion of Chapter 8 posed a very thought provoking hypothesis for me. It said, “Why have public schools in the United States become a central welfare agency for attempting to solve problems of poverty, nutrition, health, and a host of other problems? The chapter illustrates these issues in full detail and the conclusion basically compares the public school system to that of a welfare agency.

The education system, arguably the most important growth area of our society should not even be thought of as a welfare system. It should be characterized by the purpose of its existence. The first initiative of the NAACP was to abolish segregation. Education is what every parent wants for their kids. They do not want welfare.

We need to rethink the goals of our education system. Once they were a place for our kids to go during the day, a place that provided service needs for our population’s youngest. There should be a social function to schools but the focus must be on education and once everyone has that clear in the public school system, the decisions will be made off of that focus. Where should money go? Certainly not toward more and more hallway security but more and more towards new books and better teachers.

Migration only caused problems in terms of segregation and discrimination when it could have diversified our schooling system and opened the eyes and minds of many Americans to the reality of the world. Of course, we had our own agenda and that was keeping these races out of our public schools. We shot ourself in the foot. Slowed ourselves down. Education has to be efficiently managed ina  equal fashion for the benefit of all young Americans. it is a privlege.

One element that I found stayed constant throughout the United States Government’s tyranny over the native and non-native races present in America was the mentality that there was something wrong with their species. Almost like Hitler dehumanized the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Asian, Black and Native American populations were seen as sub-human. Incapable of learning and therefore shut out from society. Told to change, to somehow adopt our culture but not be a part of America’s educational. Of course this happened over a number of years.

What is stunning to me is how rampant racism was in this time period. Why, when the foundation of the constitution was based upon the equality of every man, was there so much racism? This does not make sense to me. How such a free society, could hate so easily without thought. The bigoted attitudes toward new and developing cultures was harsh and not open-minded. This practice was defined in the book at “deculturalization” and I think that this paints a picture of America’s approach to their neighbors and those arriving on ships from overseas. There was a sense of elitism, an ‘I’m better than you’ culture show explicitly in the Naturalization Act of 1790, defending the white’s livelihood in America.

And what I finally realized is that our racism in American probably came from fear. Fear that some other nation like the British could dominate us. The settlers who moved to the New Land, the New Frontier wanted freedom from the powers across the Atlantic. So they were forced to criticize and dehumanize other races with the power of force, disallowing their cultures from being accepted in our common one.

At the birth of the education system, women were the consummate educators of their time. This status shift from at first pushing women away from the workplace, toward incorporating them in the teaching profession placed men in higher positions in the educational hierarchy (officials, principals, superintendents). The Pestallozian method explains that the maternal love for the pupils was a necessary component of the in-class learning experience. That only with this nurturing and could the pupils be taught the moral code necessary in American society. I do believe that this can be helpful, but I also believe that home is a place for maternal care and affection, not school. School should be more academically focused. However, when the education system became more of an up and down hierarchy, the legislation will make less sense to the teachers and affect the children that much more. When there was no connection between the top and the bottom and when school officials stopped being educators and turned into enforcers, I think children stopped enjoying the school days and they just looked forward to learning less so than they used to. It is simply a ripple effect. If there are men at the top who have never even taught in the classroom, how are they making decisions regarding the classroom structure? There is no logic in this.

I do agree with the notion that teachers and students should engage in healthy dialogues for the purpose of fostering a wholesome relationship and work together early and often. Students should also collaborate with one another to improve their communication and teamwork skills. This clearly made for a more cohesive and compatible learning environment during that time period when the whole world was taking pointers from America. With a lot of dialogue, it was shown that students were more engaged and learned more as a result. The large lecture halls clearly posed a difficulty in teaching all the students. However, I think that children thought of school as a privilege back then as opposed to recent years where adolescents cannot stand being penalized and ordered around by parental-like superiors. For students to look at schooling positively they should not have to be afforded the opportunity, school institutions have to make their experience attractive and open to change in order for the kids to truly learn. Home is the place where discipline should be implemented and even though school is an extension of the home for most, its sole purpose should not be to discipline the children. Discipline won’t be need if students are interested in their studies. School must be a place where learning happens, not where it is supposed to happen.

In retrospect, with the knowledge the America really is a free society with a separation between churches and state, it is my personal opinion that the educators should have integrated competing cultures and religions into the education. In doing so, there would be no competition or conflict and there would be harmony between cultures in society, free for our children and young adults to learn about the cultures that make up the United States. Instead, our educational system was founded on prejudice and racist beliefs, which lead to unequal funding and overwhelming segregation in the school system.

The threat of different cultures and races, namely African Americans, Native Americans, Irish Catholics, Germans to name a few, should have been embraced and incorporated into the fabric of America’s democracy. The first amendment reads that we must “respect an establishment of religion”. By the government trying to defeat these aspects of America, they created hate in a society that was supposed to be founded on the equality of our citizens.

The only way to truly change the Protestant foundation of the educational system is through reform and a transfer of power over decisions. Their needs to be a larger population in charge of the educational system so that Groupthink does not get in the way of their making good decision-making. All efforts to help other cultures failed and we saw that African American slaves attempted to educate themselves. This demonstrates the human need for learning and scholastic development, even when such an act is punishable by U.S. law.

Even though our school system was successful in many areas, out forefathers could have gone about this dilemma with much more ease if we have decided to educate through literacy purposes instead of taking Native American’s land. At the core, we need to want to educate our children indiscriminately and this will result in economic and educational success.