Archive for June, 2007
We have all been here before…
I found this old book in the university library, The Transformation of the School, by Lawrence A. Cremin. It’s a historical account of the progressive movement in American education (1867-1957). The book was written in 1961. The cover is loose, and it hasn’t been checked out since 1995, but it seems as good a [...]
Progressive Roots and Knots
I’m not much of a historian, and I’d never heard of George Counts until I learned about this speech. Addressing the Progressive Education Association’s annual conference, Counts described a world that seems all too familiar:
We live in troublous times; we live in an age of profound change; we live in an age of revolution….Today [...]Small Projects Loosely Joined
I hijacked David Weinberger’s book title for this post, which is inspired by Grace Lee Boggs’s appearance on Bill Moyer’s Journal [transcript] yesterday. Boggs was introduced as a woman who, at the age of 91, “has been a part of almost every major movement in the United States in the last 75 years, including: Labor, [...]
Democracy 2.0
Will Richardson’s post about Web 2.0 as “Cultural and Intellectual Catastrophe” referenced Andrew Keen’s critique of “radical democratizers” who threaten the “intellectual life of our society.” Will wonders “…what systemic impact we can have by pushing at the education door.”
Keen sounds off about web technologies, but he’s really talking about preserving the status quo, and [...]Classroom Blogging Backstory
The other day Mark Ahlness posted about his students spending silent reading periods reading blogs that my fourth graders wrote this year. It may interest people to hear a little bit about the production of those Pokemon blog posts and how my students used Wikipedia, especially since Doug Johnson posted a spirited and correct [...]
All Over the Map
2 weeks into my long summer break, and routines have begun to take shape. Not a lot of time with the computer, but still reading and keeping an eye on the world. I found Democracy Now on a campus radio station while driving to the soccer fields, and heard Amy Goodman’s interview with Antonia Juhasz [...]
Stirring Up Justice
Continuing my political-speech-in-the-k12-classroom theme from the previous post, I notice that Sol Stern is alarmed that teachers in New York are using radical math projects to to analyze social problems “while Chancellor Klein looks the other way.” And not only that, he’s concerned about about schools of education “spreading the word about social justice [...]
