I'm about to go back into the belly of the beast and hope I come out with an idea about how to teach children. My last experience was no more than an indoctrination program geared toward making us toe the line politically.
Linda Schrock Taylor quotes one of my favorite ed authors, two time NYS teacher of the year John Gatto:
Labeling schooling as "An Enclosure Movement For Children," Gatto says that "The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, and it isn't supposed to. School was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and an increasingly layered social order; it wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those people would define their own needs… dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development…Work in classrooms isn't significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn't answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experience, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless…Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy – these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."
UT has his scars but I'd guess his education was self-directed if only as a reaction to the oppresive enviroment. Gatto writes a lot about this concept and about how teachers need to be flexible so that students can learn things that are valuable to them. Lack of choice, overwhelming bureacracy, and coercion are holding Americas schools back. If Bush really wanted to change education he'd send a voucher to every parent in the country with no strings. Homeschools, church affiliated, high tech, low tech, Waldorfs, everybody could take their best shot. Instead of having parents be the arbiters of quality or value even many of the choice advocates preach testing centralizing more power in Washington or at the state level.
I remember sitting in pep rallys feeling relieved at not being in the classroom but being really creeped out by their concept of school spirit in a school that had very little to be peppy about. Whip up the hate towards your rival schools... one lesson we've learned pretty well at least as a nation.