Category Archives: Welfare Function

All this talk about kindergarten and whether or not we need to teach moral values in this stage of learning is a bit over the top.  Morals should be present in schools first and foremost! It’s just how we have to run our dense country if we want some kind of order.  Children cannot govern themselves, it’s our responsibility to teach them moral basics in and out of the home.  If the home is the only environment that we learn our morals, what makes us think that children will act that way without the presence of their parents?

The whole immigration welfare implementation is pretty interesting.  I don’t know if this would work since we do have such a large immigrant population and this would definitely need some funding.  I think just restructuring the way we teach instead of throwing on new programs would be a better solution to the educational institution.  Education does not need to be costly.

One thing that was not clear to me from this chapter was how the kindergarten movement was supposed to solve issues with urban poverty. When it comes to the habits of the family the kindergarten could teach the children many things but if those ideas are not reinforced at home then the students will not make progress. For many children school can be a second home, and it is good that kindergarten was more so a parental education where the kids were more learning mannerisms than anything else. The ideas presented in “A Lily’s Mission” is very cliche, I do not see it possible for a flower to really change a family so quickly and I do not want to sound negative either but ideally it really is not that easy. I like how this chapter goes in to some of the ways that schools function as more than just a place of learning. The schools were now equipped with playgrounds which allowed the kids to socialize and play together, the school lunches helped to create a nutritional diet for the studetns and the nurses checked the health of the kids. Schools had several purposes now and began to be more than just a place to learn from books. I mostly agree with this idea of schools as a social center coming from a small schools I really felt like my school was a huge family. When kids are younger they become really attached to their classmates, teachers usually will try and have the kids believe that they are family so that they will treat each other with respect. The schools help the kids maintain a sense of unity and community, they care for each other and are there for each other. As much as we may read about how the different cultures tried to prevent themselves from losing their culture it is something that must be accepted about American history. The nation who opened it’s doors to everyone who wanted freedom had to find some sense of control. Although I am in favor of one national identity I do not feel that it is right to strip other people of their cultures, but I do not see a way to have one without doing the other.

One question that I would like to pose is have the schools really done their job? Have they helped to solve problems of poverty, health and other issues?

The Kindergarten Movement was interesting to me because the chapter says that it’s sole purpose was to get children off the streets and provide education for the child as well as the parents. I agree with this section that school should be implemented on children when they’re young because it will be the only way to instill a great foundation for latter learning. I work with young children and I can tell that the parents are highly influenced by their children’s education. I also work at a program that is geared towards immigrant families, and in order for them to assimilate into the U.S, they have to learn English and the American culture. The parents often do so but talking and learning from their children. Since the children I work with are in kindergarten and first grade, their literacy level is often times higher than that of their parents. The children will also teach their parents how to speak English and help them learn as well. But I would imagine that any parents, immigrants or not, will try to help their children succeed academically as much as possible. And to do so, similar to what the book exemplified, is to just provide a better learning environment at home and to set good examples for them. However, I find that implementing such a rigid system on younger children is not the best way for them to learn. Children should be able to incorporate play with learning to make it better for them. However, as a result of budget cuts, recess and other outdoor activities are being under-funded, so children are beginning to go to school without any sort of break time to ease their stress.

I also thought the establishment of summer schools was interesting. When summer schools first began, parents were fighting for their children to admitted into the programs. But I think there is a bad connotation to summer school in contemporary society. When I was younger, my friends and I all knew that summer school only meant you failed regular school and you need extra time and practice to show that you could graduate to the next grade. However, when summer schools were first implemented, it’s primary purpose is to prolong the school year so that children would be idle for a good two months. And in that time, crime would increase, children would be unproductive, so it seemed to be a great idea to extended school to help get kids off the streets. According to the book, “idleness is an opportunity for evil0-doing” (214). I have to disagree with this point because I feel that the only thing children seem to look forward to when they’re in school is summer time. It is the only time they get to take a break from mental stress and just relax. Just as adults often need to take a vacation to relieve stress and have a mental break, children need the same. Now parents and politicians want to prolong school days and the amount of days spent in school. Increasing the days will just make children resent school even more. Referring back to video we saw in the beginning of the semester, school does not have to same meaning for children in the 21st century compared to the 19th century. So how can we revamp the school system so that it will benefit children’s style of learning better? and how will elongating the school year help?

At the start of the 1880’s till the early 1960’s there was a great increase of immigrants from Europe, Asia, Central and South America. A growth in global immigration and urbanization brought fourth innovative ideas that expanded on new notions for the social functions of schools. John Dewey explained how the new social functions of the schools would provide a means for bringing all people, their ideas, and cultures together in such a way that it would bring greater understanding and lessen friction.

As a result of this, the educational system introduced a number of movements including the kindergarten movement which was established to improve the quality of urban living and poverty where the children were conceived  as a garden to be cultivated in the same manner as a plant and the teacher was to establish a sense of growth and unity (pg 204). This system of learning was to incorporate the moral values commonly found in nuclear families that were “supposedly” lost in urban slums. The major goal of this movement was to children habits that would reform the home and educating the parents, particularly the mother.

One of my main concerns with the kindergarten movement was that colonists assumed that these immigrants didn’t already have an established sense of family and unity. They assumed that the children would be raised in an inappropriate manner and would grow up to be immoral if it had not been for the movements. People from different countries have their own way of bringing up their children but does this imply that this is the wrong way? Must there be one universal way of social and moral upbringing? How does this affect the parent and the child?

From reading the chapter, I still have conflicting views about the expanding roles of schools as social agencies. I thought it made some sense that the Kindergarten movement was considered “a primary educational method of dealing with poverty”. Poverty during the 1880’s and 90’s was rampant throughout urban cities and neighborhoods and I thought that providing kindergarten to young children was a great way of providing an early safe haven and a place where they could have an escape from the harsh environments they grew up in. I believe some of this holds true even today. I think it is very important to get children into school at an early age, especially as they are in the critical early learning stages of their life. I think it does help in preparing them for school.

What are the pros and cons of children entering school at such an early age? Is Kindergarten really beneficial to young children?

What troubled me was the sense of stereotyping and generalizations made of parents in these poor urban settings. The individuals who advocated and were behind the kindergarten movement did not believe that parents were able to properly raise and care for their children while living in these “slums”. Maybe this was true in some cases but definitely not in all cases. It would have made more sense for these individuals to figure out how to improve the social and economic conditions of these areas, thus preventing many of these issues with family structure and negative social influences. The play movement and even summer school were also seen as critical in helping alleviate the issues the children faced outside of school and in making up for the deteriorating home life. Although the school reformers mentioned some of the educational and physical benefits of the two, the main reason for their establishment was to keep children off the streets and provide children with the family structure they supposedly did not have at home. But to me, this appeared to be just an attempt to avoid dealing with the actual causes of these problems. Too much blame was being put on families and the home and not enough attention was given to the more severe issues in society.

I still feel this way about many social issues today. Many social advocates, elected officials and policymakers only seem to push for quick fix solutions rather than trying to get rid of the root causes of the problems. Can this be attributed to some of the problems that continue to persist in schools today?

The notion of the public schools as a institution to replace the lack of family structure and parental involvement in the home is a notion that I think carries though to today in our educational system. School is really a place of structure where students are taught to follow rules and commands implemented by the teacher similiar to how some homes are run. The concept of Kindergarten as being a place to promote the creativity of younger children and ready them for introduction into the higher levels of schooling is one that I think is necessary to promoting order and maturity in younger children. However, the constant argument throughout these chapters has been the use of education/schools as the center for controlling and civilizing the minds of the immigrant cultures and the less Protestant peoples. The concepts created along with the creation of schools were good goals if they would have had positive intentions alongside them. I found it interesting that Richards wanted a movement towards canned-processed food as the creation of the American diet. I wonder what Richards would think today now that alot of canned/processed foods has proven to not be beneficial to people in a whole. Everything in this chapter had to do with the misconception that immigrant cultures were barbaric and any contact with them would cause the Protestant culture to decrease and become contaminated. The Americanization of the immigrant cultures in language, diet, and schooling was a bad way to promote  American pride. I think that this process worked againgst America in the sense that every immigrant group learned how to start movements and get things done on their own for their groups social advancement.

Do you think the creation of the school cafeteria food system was a good idea, should children have been subjected to canned and heavily processed foods? Has the original concept of Kindergarten held true in our contemporary Kindergarten level of schooling? Do you think Richards’s involvement in the movement of women from the domestic sphere of “producer” to the industrial sphere of “consumer” really gave women more freedom? How do you feel about schools being social centers, are schools only for learning or do they have a dual role as an outlet for the community to use in whatever matter they choose?