Jonathan Loomis
October 13, 1998
Schools and Society
Professor Laughlin
Chapter Eight Questions
The thing from chapter eight that was new to me was the outstanding rundown of all of the various groups and factors that can affect the curriculum. Perhaps the most interesting of these to me were the states where there is a board that controls textbooks. Coming from Michigan I was never in a situation where I would have encountered these types of controls, and therefore have no personal understanding of them as being good or bad. I think the system though is fascinating, especially when it comes to the political and economic implications it has. I.e.: the "Texas and California" effect. It is incredible that the education of our children is so controlled, and yet so uncontrolled. There are these boards that have tremendous sway and are the object of such political attention, but at the same time someone can write a book like What Your First Graders Should Know and cause almost as great an impact.
I agreed with the author that teachers should be careful about how they use ready-made materials that come with any text. Students are individuals and I believe that teachers should try to personalize education as much as possible. A 1:1 teacher to student ratio would be wonderful, but it's not possible, so just blindly accepting a publisher to thousands of students ratio is outright negligence. I strongly disagree with the author's implications on page 253. At the end of this section he seems to be implying that ethnocentric education has no place in America. Our variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds is what has made us who we are. In fact, we are who we are, not who our textbooks say we are, and therefore I believe that if parents and students want to receive a Afrocentric education, so be it. White dominated culture will just have to accept that everyone is not white, and there are some people who are happy speaking Swahili and practicing African based customs here in this nation.
I would like to learn a bit more about why the author decided to write this (seemingly to me) blatantly racist section into his text.