Reading Portfolio: The Politics of Education
Section 1: Critical Reading & Thinking
Part 1: Choose one question from the engaging the text section that follows your chosen essay. Type a 250-500 word response to the question you chose. Make sure type the complete question at the beginning of your response (The typed question is not included in your response’s final word count). The essay I chose is Horace Mann’s Report of the Massachusetts Board of education… The book is called rereading America
Part 2: Reflection on the Theme: Write a 500-750 word reflection the following essential questions. Include at least three of the class readings to support your answers.
These are the three Readings: Michael Moore’s Idiot Nation, Gatto’s against school, Rose’s “I just wanna be average”,
1. In what ways were you prepared by your experiences in elementary, middle, and high school for achieving success in college? In what ways did the readings help you understand better how you were educated?
2. Education theorist David Labaree believes there have been three goals of education over the course of American history:
• Democratic equality: for citizens, everyone needs to know as much as possible, education needs to be accessible to everyone in order to create a true democracy, so anyone can contribute (public good)
• Social efficiency: for workers, everyone benefits from more skilled workers, make education more practical by offering more practical study matters and some degree of stratification (private training for public benefit)
• Social mobility: for individuals, the benefit largely goes to the individual consumer, who gains a salary increase or maintains his/her position on the social scale; this provides further stratification and differentiation between institutions (even with similar programs), as well as within institutions (from remedial to gifted)
Which goal(s) do you think should be the goals for education in the United States? Use the readings and discussion we had in class to support your answer.
Make sure pages are type in double space.