Chapter 20 (Week of 3/23/09)

I found that I disagreed with some of the points made in this chapter. First the author starts out by saying that school rules are designed to create a hierarchy. The result is that there are a few "gifted" students at the top, while the majority of students are failures at the bottom. While this may indeed be the outcome of some school policies, I highly doubt that when administrators put school regulations together that their intention is to alienate a majority of the student body. I don't necessarily agree with the Radical Schooling Theory as well. This theory states that "schools embody the class interests and ideology of the dominant class." This may be true in some schools, but I would hesitate to make such a generalization. Almost all of the educators I have worked with (granted, I haven't been in education very long...) have seen equality in education as a priority. Although the interests of the dominant class may occasionally be inadvertently taught in the classroom, more often that is not the case.

Another statement I struggled with in this chapter is that "Conformity to rules is treated by school adults as the essential prior condition for any classroom learning to take place." My initial reaction to this idea was to agree with it. I am teaching a couple of challenging classes right now in which the students struggle with classroom rules. I find it very difficult to teach and provide a positive learning experience for the students without them following certain rules. I struggle with keeping them under control almost every day. Then it occurred to me that even though the classroom rules are not always followed, the average grade in the class is pretty high. So there is an above average level of learning going on in that class despite the discipline problems. Therefore, maybe conformity to rules is not an essential prior condition for learning to take place in a classroom.