To continue our conversation from yesterday, here’s another quotation from Dr. Donald Cowan, this time from a book called Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority. Comments?
“What is so special about a school? In an administrative sense, schools are simply collections of classrooms, gathered together in strategic locations so that they can be efficiently managed and supervised, much in the manner of the factory organization after which . . they were fashioned. If students passing through schools were products, commodities useful to economic and political activities in society, then this factory model could reasonably set up efficiency as its basis of evaluation. But students are not commodities, nor are they simply useful units of economy and polity in service to society . . .In actuality, schools are communities of living beings.”
What you both seem to be suggesting is that the “factory model,” to which Dr. Donald refers, is not the model for the “efficacious” school (as he calls it elsewhere). But how much of society still holds this as the model for educational organizations? And what are the models that can replace this mass production mode and still educate a mass society?
I think this describes the shift that we are seeing–and must see–in schools. Schools are changing from institutions that sort students, that only identify the path that students will follow, to true learning communities that transform students and teachers. Education cannot be just about passing the TAKS test–or even about gaining the skills to get a good job, vital though that is. Education is about something more; it is about cultivating the sense of connection and responsibility we have to one another.
Jennifer,
I think the key word in your response was “connection.” It is through the human connections that we make (as student and teacher) that we are placed in a continuous state of discovery. Schools provide the venue for this process.