Mike Rose. Basic questions.
When I first entered the classroom a quarter century ago, Mike Rose provided a constant reminder of who I was, or at least who I wanted to be as a teacher.
In the latest issue of Educational Leadership
, Rose asks the old questions: What is the purpose of education in a democracy? What kind of people do we want to see emerge from our schools? What is the experience of education when we do it well?
In an important 18th-century essay on education, journalist Samuel Harrison Smith wrote that the free play of intelligence was central to a democracy and that individual intellectual growth was intimately connected to broad-scale intellectual development, to the “general diffusion of knowledge” across the republic.
As we consider what an altered school structure, increased technology, national standards, or other new reform initiatives might achieve, we should also ask the old, defining question, What is the purpose of education in a democracy? The formation of intellectually safe and respectful spaces, the distribution of authority and responsibility, the maintenance of high expectations and the means to attain them—all this is fundamentally democratic and prepares one for civic life. Teachers should regard students as capable and participatory beings, rich in both individual and social potential. The realization of that vision of the student is what finally should drive school reform in the United States.
