American Education Chapter 1- The Goals of Public Schooling

          Joel Spring does an excellent job of giving a foundation for why education in America has developed the way that it has. He begins his discussion of the education system by showing that the core curriculum, the thing that affects us teachers most directly in the classroom, is determined by governors and business leaders who decide how much education they really want their potential workers to have. It was very interesting to  me that almost all employers only needed their entry level positions filled by those who had a ninth grade education. After all, that is the point where most students have a firm grasp on some level of articulation and reading ability. Most of the major skills involved in hands on jobs are learned while in the first few months of that job. That does not make one very optimistic about future prospects for the job market, but I think this could easily be turned into a positive. If a student will be satisfied with an entry level job at a certain company, then perhaps this is the path to choose. However, if one really does strive to become a doctor or engineer, then we certainly need to aim for higher education. It also strikes me as true that quality of life is important.
               One may be able to get a job quickly doing low level work, but that does not guarantee an ultimate good. Thousands of hours of our lives are spent doing the work that we choose. Therefore, if it is not rewarding and we are not satisfied with our understanding of the world and how we work in it, then what is the point of getting a job straight away? Spring seems to have a problem with the fact that business leaders choose our curriculum, and so do I. The reason is (as hinted at above) that economic gain should not be the underlying goal for the individual or the nation at large, since this inevitably leads to moral decay and social ineptitude.
              Learning the historical, political, social, and economic goals of education throughout our short history was also very informative. As someone who is in Secondary Social Studies, the history of education particularly resonated with me. I knew that there was a heavy emphasis on making the good students better when the education program was initially created (mainly through privately funded schools and universities). I do not believe that Spring showed enough of the obvious correlation that exists between the evolution of our philosophies towards education with regard to the intensity of the United States’ role on the global stage. During post-Revolutionary times, the U.S.’s role was quite small so a limited number of politicians and diplomats were all that was needed in a largely still agrarian society. However, as diplomacy, trade, and interaction with other countries continued to develop, more and more people wanted to become part of the elite educated class. This process of making education more and more universal continued to develop until the middle of the twentieth century when worries about the Cold War and Civil Rights pushed the government to put the most emphasis on education that it had ever had. I appreciated that we were given a timeline, but I think the government agenda was not always acutely spelled out in Spring’s philosophy.
     The political and social goals of education were particularly striking. It is very interesting to consider things like the pledge, the national anthem, school diets, and exercise programs to be part of some grand narrative. I suppose it strikes me so much, because as teachers we are used to being the ones in the room who know what is going on. We create the lesson plans and the activities for our own specific purposes. We create the environment that displays our beliefs about teaching as well as pushes our own agenda in our subject area, whether we want it to or not. The students are assumed to be the ones who often do not wholly understand exactly what we are doing much of the time. This is not to say that plain instructions and attentive students are not the majority int he classroom. However, there is an obvious gap in intentions between teachers and students much of the time. That is why it is almost upsetting to me to put the way we focus education now into a historical perspective. When I consider where huge football programs or the constant use of the pledge originated, it makes me want to question almost everything else that is done in schools. I must admit that I am a little conflicted on this point, because I do believe in American ideals and a push towards the use of patriotism in the classroom. However, I do not think that these tools should be sued to coerce students into satisfying our own unique agendas.
The classroom is ideally a place where students come to learn, and we are often told that we should be pushing intrinsic motivation and not focusing all of our efforts on grades or rewards. However, there is a break in the logic when we discover that the entire school system is sometimes being used to form a patriotic base for a nationalistic society that may or may not be founded on ideas that the teachers, the nexus of this choice, fully support. This plays into the idea of creating a classroom community, which Spring also discusses at great length. I do not think it is possible for any classroom to completely fall under the categories of individualistic, social constructivist, or democratic because each model does have major downsides. Instead, the community the teacher creates should be a mix of the three where structure is present but students still feel free to share their own ideas and thoughts with one another comfortably as a means towards their own individual goals. It will certainly be a challenge to create the perfect balance, but as long as there is an evolution towards this goal, then the teacher is doing their job.