Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, An Argument for Democratizing Knowledge in America by Mike Rose (review)

I recall as an eighth grader getting my eyes checked for the first time and being told I was near-sighted. I resisted my first pair of glasses. I could see fine, I insisted, and if I could not, well, I would move closer to whatever I was trying to see—no big deal. It was not until I tried on those glasses that I saw how uniquely green each leaf was on the tree above me. A sparkle of sunlight on one could darken its neighbor. I saw that clouds, in puffs or streaks of white, were shaded in gray. And I saw inasmuch as I heard people speak; I thought I understood them more deeply. The world took on dimensionality. I saw more, and thought more deeply, about the world I was getting to know.

As I read Mike Rose’s Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, An Argument for Democratizing Knowledge in America, I felt much the same way as I did when I looked through that first pair of glasses. Suddenly, I saw college students, one by one, in sharp relief—up close and large as life. But by virtue of the political and economic backdrop that Rose offered me as well, I saw them too as linked to the larger social world that surrounded them—that shaped and changed them. I also saw how they used what their colleges gave them to “shape it back”—how at times they succeeded in so doing. Telescoping in, I saw individuals’ hopes—the chances they took, the determination many exuded—yet I never lost sight of their social, political, organizational, and economic surrounds. I saw them then up close but still anchored in the landscapes that shaped what they brought to class, a complex of portraits and landscapes entwined.

Let me restate this in more social-scientific terms: Organizational researchers typically cast organizations (in this case, colleges or universities) as their primary units of analysis. They cast the people who work in them largely as organizational members or actors (faculty, administrators, policy makers), as targets of organizational service (students), or sometimes as organizational products (graduates). Sociologists may think of organizations as comprising still larger institutions that define large-scale societal functions (education, government, commerce). Though taking both the social institution of education and educational organizations into serious account, Rose peers just as hard at the lives inside them even as those lives stay linked to the larger world beyond. Thus, in Back to School, Rose literally “moves into” developmental writing and General Educational Development (GED) preparation classes. We see what Rose sees, and hear what he hears, in deep and sustained ways as he travels alongside students he accompanies to class in a range of “second chance” programs: GED, developmental, vocational, occupational, and general education. We get to know those students. We hear and see them struggling with the physics of soldering metal, with chemistry as knowledge for nursing, with mathematics in fashion design. Through Rose, we also hear students voice the knowledge they bring from life to school, how helpful or confusing doing so can be. We hear and see all this and more without setting aside the larger social, historical, political, and organizational perspective that Rose carefully keeps in view: America’s unique clusterings of second chance places to learn.

Through the multifocal lens Rose offers, we see both the mechanisms of support whereby colleges are pinned to their political surround (e.g., through funding structures) and the emotional threads that link students to their larger lives beyond school. Rose describes the workman whose exhaustion in class mirrors the night shift that just ended; the young woman whose struggle to write mirrors her deeper struggle to live with depression amid recent loss of her family; the...