For the record, allusions to the Prussian model of education are really a shorthand for the many shortcomings imposed on public education, and risk a lot of ahistorical easythink when approaching those problems. Audrey Waters argues in The Invented History of “The Prussian Model of Education” that the Prussians were actually more interested, contemporary with the Glasgow system, in developing the “whole nature of the child, instead of the mere head.” How the Prussians took the blame for deficiencies that edutechnologists, libertarians, and home schoolers on the left and right have identified in public schooling, I dunno.
Poor Prussians. We tore you apart after WWI and then blame you for all our troubles.
The summer passed by like a mayfly and my son returns to school with zero enthusiasm. I don’t blame him. Two sets of lyrics from Bob Dylan enter my head as I think about why:
I try my best to be just like I am,
but everybody wants you to be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored….
And:
Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift.
Ironically, I work as a community college librarian, so you’d think I’d be gung-ho about public education. Well, I support the concept. I have always believed that education and health care were essential public goods we should invest in. Yet it would be foolish to accept uncritically the means by which we implement this charge. Education is inherently political, not only in what we teach, but in how we teach it, and to what ends. What I have witnessed as a student and as an educator over the decades is both improvement in addressing the needs of students facing learning, cognitive, and social challenges (e.g., autism, ADHD, poverty), while failing them at so many levels of policymaking. NCLB, Common Core, Race-to-the-Top, school vouchers, charter schools — many well-intentioned yet very misconstrued efforts to hammer children into the workforce corporations desire. At the ground level it only serves to perpetuate the same old ableist, classist, racist bullshit.
*rays of sunshine*
Discussion ¬