Education

Melissa Snarr 5-01-2003

To borrow a term from social movement theory, universities can be "movement halfway houses" that educate leaders for social justice. Higher education institutions have trained and nurtured numerous social movements and activists that have changed our world. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which played a key role in the civil rights movement, came from a coalition of college students. Northern college students infused Freedom Summer's voter registration drives. More recently, student networks have rapidly expanded protests of corporate globalization and the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. Anti-sweatshop and living wage movements also are building momentum because of students.

These movements emerge, in part, because university faculty and staff are part of the conscientizing process of young people. Universities emphasize systemic analysis of social problems. They prize critical thinking skills. They encourage creative use of language and symbols. Combine these skills with higher education's focus on developing leaders, and we can see the potential of the universities to produce multiple generations of justice seekers.

We find the summons in our institutions' mission statements, the statements that no student, faculty, or staff ever really reads. But it's there, the call to moral learning and social justice. At some schools, the commitment is explicit: "Loyola Marymount understands and declares its purpose to be: the encouragement of learning, the education of the whole person, the service of faith, and the promotion of justice." At others, the call is embedded in an understanding of the proper use of knowledge: "Emory's mission lies in two essential, interwoven purposes: through teaching, to help men and women fully develop their intellectual, aesthetic, and moral capacities; and, through the quest for new knowledge and public service, to improve human well-being."

Universities experience enormous pressure to deliver a marketable product. But higher education is called to be more than a conduit for career-making. Our students are more than clients. Classically, education was meant for the whole person—for "full human flourishing." As University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum notes, U.S. higher education has been devoted particularly to the "cultivation of the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally." At the core, universities are more than service providers with privileged clients. We are moral actors shaping the character and justice of society.

BUT EDUCATING change agents for social justice is not the same as encouraging increased volunteerism on campus, which is embraced much more easily by institutions and a broad political spectrum.

Jim Rice 9-01-2002

A victory for vouchers - but who wins?

David Shapiro 9-01-2001
What does standardized testing have to do with education?
Gregory Fritzberg 5-01-2001
'Easy' solutions like standardized testing won't solve enduring problems like economic inequality.

Leading Venezuelan educators and critics of President Hugo Chavez are calling his creation of 500 schools constructed and supervised by the military a political program for "ideological indoctrin

Sara Wenger Shenk 9-01-2000

The big hearts of small friends.

Elizabeth Newberry 7-01-2000

How many colleges does it take to change a community?

Duane Shank 3-01-2000
True or false: The Bible has no place in school.
A school system cannot hope to solve school violence simply by increasing security.
Duane Shank 11-01-1999
Will there still be public education for your children's children?
From sit-ins against sweatshops to lobbying against religious persecution, many students today are proving themselves to be anything but apathetic.
Kari Jo Verhulst 7-01-1999

Why we can't ignore gender bias in the classroom.

Hans Hallundbaek 3-01-1999
A remarkable new "seminary-behind-walls" program at Sing Sing prison helps to rebuild lives and offer hope.
Kristin Brennan 1-01-1999
The corporatization of higher education.
Oliver Thomas 11-01-1998
How to fix public education.
Stacy Johnson 11-01-1998
Christian education and everyday life.
Julie Polter 7-01-1998

Some Christians have tried for a "school prayer" amendment to the Constitution ever since the early 1960s, when the Supreme Court banned state-sponsored religious activity in public schools. On June 4, the latest attempt—called the "Religious Freedom Amendment" by its sponsor, U.S. Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.)—was the first such measure to reach a House floor vote in 27 years. Although it failed to get the two-thirds majority required for passage, the measure and the largely partisan vote (a majority of Republicans favored the measure, a majority of Democrats opposed) holds continuing significance for the U.S. political scene.

The Istook amendment is a case study in the muddy water that gets stirred up when true believers begin playing partisan politics. According to a New York Times report, House Speaker Newt Gingrich met with Christian Coalition Chair Pat Robertson soon after the amendment passed the Judiciary Committee. Gingrich renewed a 1994 pledge to religious conservatives to bring a school prayer amendment to a House vote. Besides the Istook amendment, Gingrich also agreed to push legislation eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and approving voucher-style tax deferrals for private religious school tuition, all before the November elections.

The Christian Coalition spent more than half a million dollars on behalf of the amendment, including radio ads in the districts of targeted members of Congress. It seems likely that votes against the Istook amendment by members of Congress up for re-election will be used against them by both secular conservatives and the Religious Right during the campaign season. Which means that a matter of faith and conscience will have been reduced to just another wedge issue in the struggle for political dominance.

Susan Gushue 7-01-1998

When we made the decision to take our older two children out of public school, my husband and I felt it was the only real choice we had. After years in a successful public Montessori program, their current public school was getting the best of them. They kept their discoveries to themselves (and these discoveries happened out of sight), and they invariably came home tired, hungry, and unsatisfied.

My son Charles, 12, is an avid reader who enjoys music and dance. But school seemed to interfere with his real learning. Instead of actively engaging him, it was just something he had to cope with. My daughter, Helen, 9, enjoyed her friends at school but when it came to learning it seemed that she was mainly just killing time. Or worse. (When a broken and desperate Washington, D.C. school system felt the pressure to improve student test scores, my daughter found herself in a windowless classroom memorizing the 20s times tables. This did not help her learn anything, least of all math.)

Our twin 6-year-old girls were doing fine in their D.C. Montessori program, but in the case of our two older children, we felt intervention was necessary.

Home schooling was a big step for us. I had never taken on such an important task. I quickly discovered that I would be more of an "unschooler," since my children—like all children, I believe—have a strong desire to learn and do not necessarily need a school curriculum to do it. We decided not to replace schoolwork with home-school work, although we did develop some regular structures for learning. Several other home-schooling families join us at different times for weekly math lessons, units on geography, a writing class, and a reading discussion group.

Charles L. Glenn 1-01-1998
The social benefits of empowered parents.
Nanette M. Roberts 1-01-1998
The wrong answer to the right question.