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What significance does Marx have for educators and animateurs today?

by Barry Burke.

Karl Marx never wrote anything directly on education - yet his influence on writers, academics, intellectuals and educators who came after him has been profound. The power of his ideas has changed the way we look at the world. Whether you accept his analysis of society or whether you oppose it, he cannot be ignored. As Karl Popper, a fierce opponent of Marxism, has claimed ‘all modern writers are indebted to Marx, even if they do not know it’.

by James Howard Kunstler 

Personally, my theory has been that the specter of peak oil pretty clearly implies the inability of industrial economies to continue producing real wealth in the customary way. In the face of this, either consciously or at a more mystical level, the worker bees in banking recognize that, in order to maintain their villas in the Hamptons, money has to be loaned into existence some other way (than in the service of industrial productivity).

We’ve tried just about everything else. There was the so-called service economy, an attempt to replace manufacturing with hamburger sales. Then there was the information economy, in which work would be replaced with knowing about stuff. Then there was the tech thing, which was about bringing internet companies that existed only on the back of cocktail napkins to the initial public offering stage of capitalization — which allowed a few hundred or so 30-year-old smoothies to retire to vineyards in the Napa Valley while hundreds of thousands of retirees lost half the value of their investment portfolios. Then there was the housing boom, which was all about the creation of more suburban sprawl under the theory that houses (or “homes,” in the jargon of the Realtors) represent an obvious sort of wealth, and therefore that using houses as collateral would allow humongous sums of money to be loaned into existence — along with massive fees for structuring the loans into bundles of bond-like thingies.

This has all failed now because the racket went too far. Every possible candidate for a snookering got snookered.

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Because class is a question of power, class is a relationship. One cannot have power alone or in a social vacuum. This means that to understand working class experience one must understand all other classes in society and how they interact. Likewise, to understand the life of the middle class (professional people, small business owners, and managerial/supervisory personnel) one must place their experiences in the context of dynamics between the capitalist and working classes. Working class studies reports on other classes much as Women’s studies has something to say about men and Black studies about White people.

One important feature of working class studies is that it addresses the lives of all working people, not just the traditional labor studies focus on collective bargaining. Working class studies addresses the full range of economic, social, political, and cultural experiences of working people. Class dynamics shape much of our social life, not just at the workplace. Changes in the distributions of income and wealth, the absence of health insurance for 45 million people, the war in Iraq, campaign finance and other corporate/government connections, concentration of media and the shaping of the news offered by the media, outsourcing, privatization of education and social security, the new Medicare law and prescription coverage - these are issues that millions of people care about and each of them is shaped by class dynamics. Significant social movements address some of these. Working class studies has something to contribute to and much to learn from all of these social movements in addition to traditional union campaigns.

Classroom contexts can promote engaged reading. Teachers create contexts for engagement when they provide prominent knowledge goals, real-world connections to reading, meaningful choices about what, when, and how to read, and interesting texts that are familiar, vivid, important, and relevant. Teachers can further engagement by teaching reading strategies. A coherent classroom fuses these qualities.

additional context:

Engagement Impacts Reading Proficiency 

Public intellectuals are symbolic figures in society, who represent social ideas and utopic visions rather than individual perspectives. Their influence and power comes from their ability to channel public fears and desires in specific directions, and to portray problems in personally affective ways.

In a report for the libertarian Cato Institute, former New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein, takes the 25th anniversary of the Reagan Administration’s A Nation At Risk report to analyze its flaws; how it perpetuated the lie that public schools were collapsing; and how warped the public’s view of the relationship between schools and the economy. Rothstein illustrates three fundamental flaws in the arguments presented in A Nation At Risk. First, the report wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning.

responses by Michael Strong and Sol Stern 

 by Sherman Dorn

Those who argue over the nature of teaching often are arguing about the appropriate metaphor: are teachers artists, craft workers, intellectuals, technicians, babysitters, … ? In the long run, I am not sure that the metaphors are that useful. (Then again, I read Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists my first year as a grad student, so I may have imbibed a distrust of metaphors from that book.) Instead, I’d argue for a close examination of how teachers make decisions.

There are a variety of ways in which people can and do make decisions, and perhaps one way of looking at teaching is matching up decision-making against these templates, perhaps creating some others, and seeing what is required for each to work successfully. The list below is not an attempt to be comprehensive or even fair:

• Improvisation. Jazz musicians start with a basic melody that is repeated, and then improvise either a solo or background.
• Scripting. Actors follow a script that is thoroughly rehearsed (for stage productions) or recorded repeatedly until satisfaction (for television, movies, etc.).
• Clinical best practices. Medical practitioners diagnose a case and follow best-practice guidelines for making decisions based on data for an individual.
• Open-source software engineering. Programmers divide tasks into modules, try to make a reasonably-working module available as soon as possible, and then use feedback from the user community to fix bugs, decide on further development, etc.
• Throwaway sketches. Designers sketch multiple disposable options before anything is produced, subject the ideas behind those sketches to a social critique, and winnow the options down to what is interesting and workable.

related: How Doctors Think -

Brain Trust: Dr. Groopman on “How Doctors Think”

From Morning Edition on “How Doctors Think”

What’s the Trouble?

A Conversation with Groopman

Stephen Krashen:

Here is the finding of greatest importance to us, in my opinion: Reading engagement can help overcome the effects of poverty. “Engagement in reading” was a stronger predictor of reading performance than SES.

 Krashen is referring to the PISA test results.

related:

International Reading Achievement: Insights into Policy and Practice Using PISA/PIRLS Data