Teachers, journalists, and lawyers are all alike -- all they think of is how to address an audience. They give no thought to how to attract an audience to begin with. So of course they give no thought to the difference between addressing a passive audience and one that is anxious to be active.
This is untrue for teachers of K through 12. The law may require students to attend school K through 12, but (a) it is next to impossible to enforce that provision of the law, and (b) having a student sit in a seat, does not mean a thing about how much or how well she is learning. The entire focus of mainstream, much less progressive, pedagogy is how to actively engage students in learning; only the reactionary schools of pedagogy assume that teaching can take the form of the 'didactic lecturing' described above.
The problem that teachers face is somewhat akin to that faced by political organizers: the general culture militates against active engagement, be it in learning or in politics, and promotes passive consumption -- TV is the paradigmatic example here. Education is thus almost a countercultural phenomenon in this country, and teachers face many obstacles in actively engaging students in learning. This is, in part, my attraction to Gramsci: I think he has a model of politics as education, and a model of education as politics.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010104/134ef451/attachment.htm>