'The Book' - Blog 2

Hello Fellow Classmates,

Chapter 1 continued...

So we left off when society was going through massive upheaval and was starting to lose 'faith' in itself. It was around this time that according to the book the 'soft' human relations school of labour enjoyed a boom. The civil rights movement and woman's rights movements were in a sense repeated. The key response to the movement against repressive social relations appeared in education. The idea of the open classroom prevailed and liberal education saw this as a way to 'keep things from getting out of hand,' and to keep young individuals 'in line' in light of all of the chaos from which the end of the 1960's brought about. I have started the book titled The discipline of Hope, by Herbert Kohl who looks into this concept if you would like to look at the idea of open classroom further. He believed that students and teachers could learn from each other, and that the typical classroom setting was oppressive when trying to reach students.

The education system had become the laboratory where all of the solutions to the issues of personal liberation and social equality were tested and the arena in which social struggles were fought out. (Note: It is interesting how the book speaks in the present tense, where as I am speaking in the past tense, sorry I might switch between the two.) The authors stated that the school system is a pawn for the corporate economy. School was being used by the capitalist society to further accommodate it. Essentially it was used as a tool to keep corporate America running. There was a situation that occurred in the education system where the capitalist economy was instilling its values. I still remember being in school really wanting those brand name jeans.. any one remember Guess jeans...

School was now the way for reform, which was discussed in class. The idea that the classroom was where all of the social ills would be taken care of. It was now the teachers responsibility to cover this hole in society, as was mentioned before in the first blog. The authors stated that the capitalist 'society' at the time was pushing schools and education as the answer for which all the problems were to be solved. This conveniently took the problem away from economic reform. (Later in the chapter the authors bring about the point that it is actually economic reforms that need to be instilled to solve these problems that were occurring in society.) I do remember from my own experience education getting a bad rap, but could it possibly stem from this? As was discussed in class which the authors speak to next, the education reforms that were being instilled were not working. Within political and educational circles, there was a sense of defeat. At the time there was a very disappointing result in the war on poverty. By the early 1970's a broad spectrum of social science opinions were ready to accept the view put forward by Jencks et al. that in regards to the study 'Inequality': A more open school system would do little to create a more equal distribution of income or opportunity. Where to go form here?

Out of all of this backlash against the way society was cleared the ground for the Conservatives to claim that I.Q. is really what matters. The poor are poor because they are intellectually incompetent. The cycle of poverty continued because of this low I.Q. factor which they claimed was a heredity issue, not an economic one. There was also the view point that liberal /education reform had failed because the problems were rooted in the values and attitudes of the poor and family patterns that arise from this. I was so turned around at this point that I am not sure what to say due to all of the finger pointing. Free-schools / the open classroom fared a little better amongst all of the finger pointing but not by much. The question that kept coming up now was "Can the youth really be capable of making good use of their freedom?" Groups in society were now thinking perhaps this is all we can expect from the education system: reforms that really don't work. This continued to fuel a mood of pessimism.

The mood at this time looked to be the culmination of of all of the dashed hopes of the past decade and a half. Through my own lens of learning about the 1960's, I think that the citizens of the U.S.A. were shaken and never fully recovered from the tragedy's of losing J.F.K, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King to senseless violence. This pessimism seemed to touch the ways the average citizen dealt with the issues that were occurring, transforming from a celebration of the individual, as the book states, to an unhealthy way of coping, that consisted of sex and drug use. What was not mentioned in the book due to the year in which was finished, the AIDS epidemic started in the early 1980's which could not have helped the pessimistic view point at the time.

To be continued...