Is Jonas Dead?

I have been trying throughout my blog to post information and responses in a fairly non-committal manner. I have tried to investigate items without ranting about personal beliefs. I have tried to remain as unbiased as possible.

But after reading “Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire” I couldn’t help but feel a little emotional. John McWhorter argues in The New York Sun that Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, which he says does not change the status quo, is actually harming inner-city schools. I have not read Kozol’s text yet, but I will soon as my capstone class is starting it over break.

Part of this was because so many of them have been taught to resist doing their jobs effectively. It is no big secret that we have known how to teach poor children to read from book-shy homes for 40 years. Back in the 1960s, the federally funded education program, Project Follow Through, showed that the best strategy for reading was rigorous, phonics-based instruction termed Direct Instruction.

I can’t help but feel the arrogance in this opinion. If the best way to teach reading was discovered 40 years ago why do people continue to research this subject? Are whole language or sentence combining strategies completely useless since they were created post-1960? I think it is incredibly narrow-minded to assume a past breakthrough is as good as pedagogy can get in a subject. And what about teachers being taught to resist doing their jobs effectively? McWhorter continues explaining this concept.

Whence the curious notion that anything could be better than a technique that works? There is also a larger problem that has more to do with inner city schools’ failures than funding — schools devoted to inculcating leftist dogma rather than imparting skills…

An especially cherished text is Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a peculiar piece of Marxist rhetoric, complete with a call to render teachers learners and students teachers.

I knew it! The leftist indoctrination of America’s youth is to blame for today’s inner-city public school situation. I cannot subscribe to this theology as a future teacher in good faith. If all I consider myself to be is an ‘imparter of skills’ I will be nothing more than a cog in a machine. I will spit out unquestioning machines who do not question the status quo. The assault on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed actually hit a personal level with me as I am currently reading it.

McWhorter is upset with the concept of teachers becoming learners and students becoming teachers. His opinion on this is completely different than my own. If I cannot learn from my students, if I feel I know everything and no one can teach me, if I lose humility I will no longer be a teacher. I will be a tyrant. Likewise, if my students never feel responsibility for their learning, if my students never learn about their own respective potential, if my students never realize they have knowledge and experience which can be helpful to others they will never be able to be critically involved in society. So much for my unbiased blog, but sometimes you just have to vent.

Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire

Johnathan McWhorter

February 22, 2007

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