While watching School: The Story of American Public Education, I thought about how young public education actually is. Horace Mann started making his reforms of the fledgling system around the middle of the nineteenth century. It doesn’t really surprise me now to see that attitudes have not completely changed in less than 200 years. Teachers were originally men who could do nothing else. Today, a great amount of American society views teachers with a certain amount of skepticism. During Mann’s time, the universal right of education was not a given. Today, many people still believe education is not for everybody, perhaps not aloud, but by their distaste of taxes that go toward the system. Schools are often unequal because of the funds accessible to some people, usually the rich.
Given these attitudes, I think it is very important to excel at negotiating what can be a hostile environment as we become teachers. The practice of multicultural education is important, but we have to keep in mind that we are not just challenging a system, but a deeply ingrained mindset. People don’t respond well to such a challenge. Our work will therefore be very important because we won’t just be teaching in a different way; we will be ambassadors of a program that can have serious positive effects on communities.
No comments:
Post a Comment