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6. Education
- University of Illinois Press
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Benoit Bourque from Québec introduces a young pupil to playing the spoons. Photo by Tonee Harbert. 6 Education The events of September 11, 2001, cast the work of our schools in sharp relief. Because of the hour of the attacks, most children were in class at the time, and it fell to teachers to inform students and help them try to process the incoming data. “We didn’t want to needlessly frighten them,” said one of my teenage daughter’s teachers, “but there was clearly a lot of information that they would need if they were to understand what was going on.” Most important, students asked why this had taken place. Who were the terrorists? What motivated them? What is Islam? How could America have allowed this to happen? And as they watched the televised scenes of Arab children celebrating the attacks, they asked why the rest of the world seems to hate us so much. Real questions—and ones without easy or reassuring responses. This de facto role as first-line emergency counselors to America’s youth was unprecedented in this generation of educators, and it triggered a deep 128 / Cultural Democracy introspection on the part of teachers and administrators, a reexamination of our schools’ mission. As happens so often in moments of catharsis, what they saw was both encouraging and troubling. September 11 revealed extraordinary resilience and compassion among teachers, who rose to the challenge of addressing those knotty questions, even as they were themselves struggling to grapple with the impact of the events. But it also indicated some enormous gaps in the results of contemporary American education : why do so few of our students know what Islam is about, or where Afghanistan is on a map? The area of knowledge that has been largely left behind by our schools is culture, the engine driving events, like September 11, that now impact the life and future of every student. “After 9/11 was the right time for schools to ask the big questions,” writes Tim Walker of Teaching Tolerance. “Dialogues have to be initiated that look beyond curriculum,” says Lew Smith of Fordham University. “What kind of students do we want to produce? Why are we doing what we are doing?” The conversation needs to include the entire school community, “not just inspired administrators or isolated classroom teachers.”1 Walker believes the response to a crisis like September 11 offers schools the opportunity to comprehensively examine what schools are all about, and assess how well they are carrying out their purposes. “What is the mission of education in a democracy?” asks Benjamin Barber , president of Rutgers University. “In the first instance, democracy itself, just as a primary mission of democracy is public education. The spirit of inquiry (asking tough questions) coupled with the capacity to judge (offering provisional answers) defines both liberal education and education for liberty, both critical learning and deliberative democracy.”2 Without a citizenship educated to the moral responsibilities of democracy, Barber argues, the rights that Americans treasure are no more than rhetoric. Liberty takes practice. “But for all practical purposes, equality is not the condition of learning and experience but is produced by them. If education must create both liberty and equality, it becomes the foundation of all individual growth and all collective civilization. Nothing is more important.”3 Liberty can be pretty abstract, and its nuance might be lost on politicians whose idea of education reform is to cut school budgets. But there is a compelling reason why even fiscal conservatives should get behind education: it pays. “Studies of national growth find a clear connection between economic success of nations and their human capital as measured by the level of education,” points out economist Richard Florida. “. . . Research by Patricia Beeson, an urban economist at the University of Pittsburgh, supports this view. Her ongoing work explores how investments in various sorts [3.209.81.51] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:49 GMT) Education / 129 of infrastructure have affected city and regional growth since the mid-nineteenth century. She finds that investments in higher education infrastructure predict subsequent growth far better than investments in physical infrastructure like canals, railroads or highways.”4 Educated citizens not only participate in democracy, but they tend to create a lot more wealth, for themselves and for their communities, than do illiterates. American schools are partway through a reformulation of vision and pedagogy in response to the requirements of the twenty-first century. Crises like September 11 push...