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eBook details
- Title: Education, Policy and Social Justice: Searching the Borderlands Between Subjective Science and Experimental Art (Report)
- Author : Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 336 KB
Description
As the global economic crisis worsens, it is timely to think through the role that education will play and should play within this unprecedented milieu. Historically, public schooling in the United States has been a follower. Whether Spitnik (Brzezinski, 2008), so called lack of discipline (Cantor & Cantor, 2001), back to basics (Gehring, 2008), or falling standardized test scores (Kaplan, 2008), public schooling has reacted to policy directives as opposed to being at the forefront of these directives. This reactive role has strengthened the conservative nature of this institution by interpreting policy coming into the schools through established dominant traditions and discourses (Gitlin & McConaughy,2008). This embrace of these dominant traditions and discourses diverts schooling from its potential role in forging policy. And not just any policy, but policies that can redefine and challenge one of the effects of the current global economic crisis--the growing gap between the "haves" and "have nots". The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development ((OECD, 2008) speak to this effect, in their report titled "Growing Unequal", and suggest that the upsurge in economic inequality will create increased divisiveness (my emphasis) between the rich and poor. (p.5). We can begin to see this divisiveness between the haves and have nots in the U.S. with the emerging tensions between "wall street" and "main street". And so far, without question, wall street (the haves) is getting the vast majority of money as part of the economic bail out programs. Given the probability that the gap between rich and poor will increase as will vilence and dissent between have an have nots, it is urgent that schools do not respond to this economic crisis by reacting to new policy initiatives that are likely to try to maintain the privilege and advantages of the haves . What is needed is not only an assertion of the importance of social justice (a form of justice loosely defined as making group relations more equitable) as an ambition for schooling, but the development of knowledge producing epistemology's within schools that are not totally seduced by their conservative traditions and discourses.