www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2008Kids and learningA teacher of 8th grade students in the school with the lowest state test scores in the City of Detroit receives a lot of sympathetic comments when announcing her profession, usually beginning with "These kids" or "Kids today" and describing some circumstance like rap music, crime, poverty or poor parenting, and concluding with "don't want to learn." Children learn every day of their lives, no matter where they grow up. A more accurate conclusion would be, "Kids today don't listen to adults promoting middle-class values." The reasons "kids today" are so much more alienated from older generations are complex: a capitalist society which doesn't need their labor, an alienating culture that capitalist society creates. Although the educational model in which teachers know and give and students don't know and receive was discarded half a century ago, vestiges remain. Belief that the middle-class ways, values and speech are Good and the underclass ways, values and speech are Bad persists. Middle-class ways, values and speech can give people an opportunity to advance in a capitalist society, but children, especially poor children, realize that the myth of the American dream is not for them. Hard work does not get their families into better jobs or safer neighborhoods. Long-term goals are too often derailed by unemployment, poor health, inadequate transportation, dangerous neighborhoods, traditions of under-education. Why work and save money to enter college when family members spend their time and money partying? Why speak standard English when your mother gained respect in the neighborhood for cussing out the principal when you were suspended from school? Why practice job-ready behavior when there are no jobs that you can get to, or you're fired from a fast-food job because your manager stole from your cash drawer? The controversial "No Child Left Behind" Act dominating K12 education should more correctly be called "No Middle-Class Child Left Behind." It is said that kindergarteners raised in poverty will have heard 30 million fewer words than children of middle-class backgrounds by the time they are five years old. The gap in their speaking, writing, reading, and comprehension, measured on the standard tests, which determine life or death for all school systems, increases with age. Inner-city public school districts are unable to meet the increasingly stringent standards of the act, whose steps for "Remediation" actually lead to closing public schools and opening those same buildings as charter schools--with no unions to impede the profit motive. It is hard to envision education that allows young people to grow into their full humanity in a society on new foundations, after capitalism has been uprooted. That is all the more reason for Marxist-Humanists to try to work out concrete ramifications for education of a society based on the human being and to look forward to the day when teachers and students together explore the best of the old and continue to work out the new. --Susan Van Gelder |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
