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Reminds me of the saying, you may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you.
Education is inherently political.
I'd hazard to suggest that politics is one way in which society organizes and tries to reconcile its collective biases. Education seeks to systematize them.
Some of the Soviets took this idea to its extreme.
Education is inherently political.
I'd agree or disagree depending what you mean by that.
There's lots to unpack, but there's two main angles:
- Education vis à vis the act of educating
- any teacher, administrator or even parent that sets about educating the youth has to make curriculum choices based on the temporal relevance of a topic.
- relevance based on perceived temporal (non-)importance of a topic (e.g. Capernican heresy)
- Education vis à vis public education (or the bureaucraric machine)
- just about everyone in society has a stake in it
- political ramifications in every systematic/policy choice
I agree with both your points.
I'd say that in terms of curriculum choice, I'd call a teacher "political" if their goal is to impart students with a particular political point of view rather than to help them understand multiple points of view from multiple angles
Certainly.
Teach inquiry, not dogma.
Lead your student to the well, but do not try to fill their bucket.
Do you think any worthwhile lessons are conveyed through AP History courses?
We face a similar situation in Singapore. Let me zoom in on financial literacy. We do have those classes, but we sound like a broken record since the main thrust of these lessons tends to be spend below your means and differentiate between needs and wants for both primary and secondary school students. Like duh. How often do you want to repeat the same mundane stuff?
But as a teacher at the frontlines, I dare say that our curriculum lacks the space to incorporate all these useful things. Just this term alone, I had to ensure that all my form class students completed an online lesson on 1) drug prevention, 2) AI literacy and 3) water conservation. Their minds are bombarded left right and centre, and I’m barely surviving in this cramped system myself haha
Financial literacy includes being able understand what an interest rate is, what are the different types of loans, credit cards, checking and savings accounts, retirement plans, insurance, mortgages, business loans, different types of corporations, etc, etc. All of these things, kids come out of school knowing very little about, but these are a part of everyday lfie.
It would be easy to fill a semester of financial literacy, imo.
In public schools, there's a lot of very poor quality teaching going on, even in vocational classes. And I'm talking about "good" public schools, not inner-city hellscapes.
For instance, a young person I know was taking a cooking class. It was overall not terrible, but:
- The teacher was absent a lot. Lots of teachers are gone a lot. Then you have a substitute. The substitute is NOT allowed to actually let the kids cook! So they have to read about cooking, or watch a video. Probably less than half the time are they actually cooking.
- Most of the time, the kids were taught to make sugary crap - cakes, cookies, sweet crepes, etc. Very little of "here's how to cook a decent, healthy meal".
Another example - I took a woodworking evening class at a public high school recently. I had high hopes, but the actual teaching was absolutely miserable.
- It made me sick to see tens of thousands of dollars of woodworking equipment so poorly treated. Very expensive equipment, not even any simple instructions on how to use it. Lots and lots of expensive wood, wasted because of easily avoidable issues.
- The woodworking teacher was awful. He picked a really complicated project, using the most complex equipment, and was then often unavailable to show us how to use it. Out of 6 students, only 1 finished the project (the one with prior experience).
Good teaching, with good, high quality teachers, is very rare in the public school system.
That's not accurate, no public school in the nation is pushing kids to become political activists. Informing students about history is essential so we don't repeat it, as we are unfortunately seeing right now with the actions being taken by the Trump administration. Just because the facts of history make.white people look bad doesn't mean we shouldn't teach it. The real goal here is to try and rewrite textbooks to keep students from learning about these past atrocities and events so they can be repeated. Also, it's a well known fact that the states that score the worst in the country academically for the most part are red states. The actions the Republicans take in attempts to defund public education and try and force universities to bow to their agenda is all because Republican politicians know that if they can keep these young people uneducated they can convince them to vote for them. The war on public education is real and it's scary. TEACHING HISTORY ACCURATELY IS NOT POLITICAL. ITS SIMPLY PRESENTING THE FACTS.
It depends who's saying it and what "non-academic" subjects they are pushing to teach.
Many in the US will push to teach kids to focus on historical grievances and political activism. I disagree with these people and think they are damaging the minds of young individuals.
Others may want to teach kids more vocational skills, or life skills like personal finance. I am on the side of these people. I think it's criminal that many students graduate high school and even college and don't know what a bond is, or how to calculate return on investment.