The Last Page
Meier, Deborah
BOB CHASE, the president of the National Education Association, recently declared that its members should "move beyond ideology" and "Politics must stop at the school door." As I daily try to...
...Is the increasing use of state legislation to decide how to teach nonideological...
...Maybe we should require communities to take responsibility for their own ideas and then let lots of different definitions co-exist...
...But the truth is that public education needs more, not less, "ideology...
...Is the growing support for vouchers and privatization a sign that we have taken politics out of education...
...students prepared to explain evolution or the motion of the planets, but who in their heart believe that the Bible and astrology provide better explanations than paleontology or astronomy...
...Important concepts become items to be stuffed in and regurgitated out...
...Yes, to ask such questions will cause political friction...
...The standards-driven reformers proclaim "high standards" that are fundamentally antiintellectual...
...Is the fact that mayors are now directly involved in running city school systems a sign that politics has stopped at the school door...
...It's a proposition filled with ideas, begging for counter ideas...
...It might just be that a democratic society shouldn't have one single definition of what constitutes being "well-educated...
...We'll produce students who can pick the right answers to "basic math" questions but cannot see through the gross misuse of statistical data by politicians and advertisers...
...We will never get closer to having good schools when our only definition of a good school is one that has higher test scores than some other schools...
...So long as tests rank children precisely, they appear to be scientific...
...It should be one of our tools...
...The new panacea—"standards-driven reforms"—views the imposition of highstakes state and national tests as a way to drive (that is, control and monitor) performance by people whom society has decided to distrust—the children, their teachers and their families, especially those in our "inner cities...
...Ideas are central to the function of democratic schooling— which involves training kids to think carefully about other people's ideas and to take responsibility for their own, Pluralism and diversity require convincing the very young that ideas do matter, that they are tools for a lively and interesting life...
...Is there, in fact, a single definition of the well-educated adult, and should there be...
...Such practices will give us students prepared to give three reasons for World War I, but none who might wonder if it could have been avoided...
...No: these are symptoms of an ideological attack on our public institutions...
...DEBORAH MEIER 128 n DISSENT / Spring 1999...
...Ideology," defined as "a body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture," is central to what schools should be about...
...In a democratic society, ideology should not become our enemy—the villain in the story...
...As long as our definition of "good enough" is comparative, we'll be avoiding the tough task of defining goodness...
...But democracy is all about politics, about differences of opinion...
...Instead of "ideas," we now have tests— the tougher the better...
...When "ideology" is missing what we often have is an ideology in disguise, masked as "common sense...
...As I daily try to weave my way through the politics of schooling in order to focus on children, faculty, and families, I find it hard to be unsympathetic to this sentiment...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
