BOOM

How does an institution such as education that is conservative by nature survive, much less thrive, in a social reality noted for enormous change?  There is little evidence of it thriving today.  There are pockets of dynamic and interesting developments and innovations but, by all accounts, this common enough institution is suffering from a general lack of successes.

We all generally feel we know this place called school; it’s an institution we deal with for a number of years during our lives – as students and parents of students.  But how well do we know these places?    If you ask the typical person why we have schools, he/she would probably respond that schools are the places we learn things, where we acquire knowledge.

  Yet knowledge is not a stagnant entity; as a matter of fact, we are in the midst of an explosion of knowledge.  There are two areas of concern where this explosion is being palpably felt:  in the fields of technology and of social relations.

          The first of these fields is readily seen.  Warren L. Ziegler makes a few observations on the pace of technological change:  the language of mathematics has added more developments to its arsenal of expressions in the last hundred years than were developed in all of history before 1900; it is anticipated that about half of what we teach engineers today will be passé in ten years, and half of what we teach students today will be no longer truthful or otherwise useful by the time they are in their forties or fifties.[1]  That is a quick turn around and reflects how much new knowledge is being produced.

          Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins attribute a great deal of this explosion to something called “branching.”[2]  That is, specialties are being subdivided and creating areas of study at a greater pace, and within each subspecialty, there are very bright people advancing what is known in ever greater specificity. 

Of course, this causes certain concerns.  One, the more obvious is how do we as a society, generally, and education, more specifically, deal with this increase not only overall, but in such variety?  And two, how do we assist in informing people about developments across various fields?  How do scientists, engineers, and other experts keep up with developments in other branches, much less in other disciplines, that have bearing on their work or interests?  This is daunting in itself.

Now consider what that means to education that is charged with introducing people to those various fields.  One would think that central to such introductions is giving the neophyte a good sense in which direction a particular discipline is headed.  And yet with so much branching, is there a direction?

Curriculum workers, therefore, have the challenge to select meaningfully and viably the knowledge they will include in any given field and determine how they should organize that knowledge, both in what is new and what is not so new.  The disciplines are dynamic entities.

And yet, in the midst of all this change in the one basic “commodity” that education peddles, knowledge, how does it sustain essential areas of knowledge that education must not forget, especially public school education?  It has been argued in this blog – and it is still believed – that the primary responsibility of schools is to prepare young people to be good citizens.

Given that, how do schools maintain a focus on that charge?  Any change agent must hold on and honor that basic responsibility.  And it is in this more socially oriented realm that we are experiencing the second source of great change:  the social dimension and how schooling is expressed politically.

Schools are not the traditional comfort zones they used to be.  From dealing with diversity to the handling of “inconvenient truths” such as global warming and what we now know about race, the beginnings of life, what actually happened historically in our past, all of this is part of the “boom” in knowledge.

And this could prove to be the most challenging aspect of schools as a change target for change agents.  It is in this political environment that he/she will attempt to introduce even newer ideas, goals, functions, and processes.  And yet, given the paucity of successes alluded to above, can we afford not to attempt change?  Given the effort here, one can surmise that the answer being proposed is no.  Hopefully, the reader agrees.

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[1] Warren L. Ziegler, Social and Technological Developments, rev. ed., (Syracuse, NY:  Syracuse University Press, 1981).

[2] Allan Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins, Curriculum:  Foundations, Principles, and Issues, (Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon, 2004).

P S

Would you judge a person by the size of his/her pancreas?  Silly question?  Then why do so many of us judge others by the color of their skin – just as silly.  If you were to determine what the size of each person’s pancreas was and then categorize them according to size, say three sized categories – small, medium, and large – and then correlate the sizes to other factors such as crime figures, attendance in college, Nobel prizes, etc., for each correlation one of the sized categories would correlate the highest and one would be the lowest.

Is there a cause and effect relationship among those correlations or are they just happenstance occurrences?  Most of us would say they are happenstance.  But suppose for some weird reason(s), people began believing that there was a cause and effect relationship and began treating the negatively or positively affected group in some unusual way. Would that treatment enhance the belief or assuage it?  It would probably enhance it.

So the belief is not one based on biological factors – the genetic factor(s) that cause people to have the size pancreas they have – but the social construct (the shared, made up belief) that says pancreas size (PS) leads to the behaviors one sees and with which one must deal.

          Yes, all of this is silly.  But it reflects a serious problem.  For example, the most glaring example is the historical treatment of African-Americans.  That treatment has led to the conditions that exist today, not the biological factors that cause the different shades of skin color we see.  Here, there is a people who were taken against their will from their homes and enslaved.  Then there were generations upon generations of people enslaved and deemed to be inferior in every way possible.

Upon liberation from slavery, they were subjected to horrendous social conditions and messages that continued the negative stereotypes.  And yet those people today can claim, beyond all the negative treatment, advancement.  Most African-Americans live middle class lives, just like the rest of us.  This is due to their diligence, hard work, and continued hope that things would/will get better.

          One such person made it to the highest office in the land.  But this negative social construct persists and among some, the effects can still be seen in promoting the counterproductive behaviors – on both sides of the racial divide – that further the negativity.  In a shorthand way, this brief piece is an attempt to describe what is meant by saying that race is a social construct, a social construct educators have the responsibility to set straight.