Ira Shor - Empowering Education: Critical Thinking for Social Change

I found this article to be very, very long and really hard to get through. But I did find the idea of a democratic education to be interesting. Its like school deconstructed, and it makes me wonder if students actually learn better in an environment like this. I have never really experienced school like that so I can't imagine what it would be like. No set curriculum and students of all ages learning together at one time to me, I just can't fathom it. But at the same time I feel like a school that would build on the creativeness and knowledge of a student to be ideal. I did find out that there is a school to follows democratic education right here in Providence though. The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (The MET as they call themselves) has been in existence for 11 years, and in its four schools has only a little over 300 students.

Some quotes that I found interesting in Shor's article are:

1. "In sum, the subject matter, the learning process, the classroom discourse, the cafeteria menu, the governance structure, and the environment of school teach students what kind of people to be and what kind of society to build as they learn math, history, biology, literature, nursing, or accounting. Education is more than facts and skills. It is a socializing experience that helps make the people who make society." - Page 15

   When I first read the part about the cafeteria menu helping to teach students about what kinds of people they should be it made me think of when you see fried chicken and corn bread during Black History month or on Martin Luther King's birthday. The idea that all of these things help to make people at first seems outlandish but when I thought about it some more it made sense. From everything that we have learned from all the other articles we have read education really is more than learning about facts and skills. A student learns social norms and cues, the rules and codes of power, and how to live in society.

2. "People begin life as motivated learners, not as passive beings... But year after year their dynamic learning erodes in passive classrooms not organized around their cultural backgrounds, conditions, or interests. Their curiosity and social instincts decline, until many become non-participants." - Page 17

   I found this statement to be really interesting and something I've never really thought about it. We learn the most when we are still very little, we are born as motivated learners and as a baby you don't learn to talk sitting at a desk doing worksheets, we learn by interacting with others and doing. It makes sense that after years and years of being in a passive classroom a student's curiosity would decline.

3. "The empowering classroom can open their voices for expression rarely heard before. Their voices are an untapped and unexpected universe of words rich in thought and feeling. From it, students and teachers can create knowledge that leaves behind the old disabling education in a search for new ways of being and knowing." - Page 54

   I think this would be a perfect setting for a classroom, when students do speak out they give thoughts and ideas that teachers would not always think of. Together students and teachers would create a great classroom experience for everyone past the education that might bind some students.