Current Reading

This blog is primarily for me to blog my responses to books that I'm reading. Sometimes I blog about other stuff too, though.

Poverty by America by Matthew Desmond.

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Word cloud

Thursday, April 2, 2020

Hofstadter, wrapping up

For some reason I don't have it in me to laboriously type out every awesome quote in chapters 13-14. I'll just note two things:

1) Hofstadter's description of the "life adjustment" movement, which tried to make high school more relevant to the kid who isn't going to college, initially makes me sympathetic to them. The biggest challenge I face is working with kids who were pushed into college by progressive educators, not kids who were steered away from college by progressive educators.  Progressive education sure has changed!  In an earlier era they thought it was silly to put college on a pedestal, but now they want everyone to go!

The problem with "life adjustment", alas, is that they also didn't think much of preparing a subset of the students for college.  They thought everyone should get that same lowest common denominator, rather than different strokes for different folks.  If progressive educators actually appreciated individual diversity they'd be fine with individualized paths.

2) The chapter on Dewey is full of awesomeness, and I'm not going to quote all of it.  Several years ago I quoted the awesome closing line of the chapter.  This time I'll quote something from near the beginning:
[Dewey] has been praised, paraphrased, repeated, discussed, apotheosized, even on occasion read.
I've tried reading Dewey, and he's boring.  But one of these days I will make myself read a couple of his essays all of the way through, because I hate myself that much.

Now I'm off to read a few books that I probably won't feel like blogging.

2 comments:

Philip Ebersole said...

You make me want to read this.

Miss Self-Important said...

I study Dewey and he is incredibly boring, and I only assign him b/c it would be malpractice to teach a philosophy of education course w/o him. But he is not actually good or worth reading for his own sake, unless you just want to know what bad ideas you're up against in education. Don't tell my students I said this.

The life adjusters didn't put college on a pedestal b/c they thought only 10-20% of students were capable of attending it, another 20% could do skilled labor, and the other 60% were fit only for unskilled occupations like elevator operators and tram car drivers. So, good, they didn't overshoot, but perhaps they low-balled?