Communities as curricula

Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy

Volumn 15, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 106-111

  Theobald, Paul ^a   Curtiss, Jim ^b  

^a Division of Education   (United States)

^b WAYNE STATE COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0242639042     PISSN: 08878218     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. T. Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Bard/Avon Books, 1999).
2. J.B. Conant, The American High School Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).
3. The most preeminent communitarian scholar is Canada's Charles Taylor, but there are scholars in the United States who have developed reputations almost as distinguished as his. Among them are Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Amatai Etzioni and William Galston represent two additional American scholars who have pressed hard to apply communitarian analysis to actual policy decisions. Though no education scholars are typically mentioned as leading communitarian thinkers, certainly the work of individuals such as John Goodlad, Theodore Sizer, and James Comer reflects thoughtful analysis of the role education might play in the cultivation of community. David Orr, Wes Jackson, and Wendell Berry have also written extensively about this idea.
4. Such an emphasis on the future confirms Mine's analysis of high school as an extended period of irrelevance.
5. Our cultural druthers for creating "unencumbered selves" - as Michael Sandel refers to the results of American political theory - are due, in large part, to our peculiar version of what constitutes freedom. Given our birth through separation from Great Britain, we have tended to embrace negative conceptions of freedom, that is, the idea that freedom really is about the absence of coercive power. There were, and are, other liberal conceptions of freedom, however, that do not result in political theory so singularly focused on the freedom of individuals to acquire what they can. Communitarians tend toward more positive conceptions of what constitutes freedom.
6. J. Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed," in K. Ryan and J. M. Cooper, eds. Kaleidoscope: Readings in Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p.280.
7. Moral development theorists are increasingly placing the locus of moral reasoning outside of the self and in the community. Thus, a society that destroys its communities also destroys its ability to evaluate life on a moral basis - hardly the kind of citizenry equipped to wield democratic authority. The philosopher Dale Snauwaert contends that "moral development is by definition intimately connected to community." See D.T. Snauwaert, Democracy, Education, and Governance: A Developmental Conception (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 60.
8. The best single source primer on constructivist thought related to questions surrounding curriculum and instruction is J.G. Brooks and M.G. Brooks, The Case for Constructivist Classrooms (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 1993).
9. R. Miller, ed., Educational Freedom for a Democratic Society: A Critique of National Goals. Standards, and Curriculum (Brandon, VT: Resource Center for Redesigning Education, 1995), p. 8.
10. J. Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan/Collier, 1963), p. 67.
11. Readers interested in learning more about what's going on in Howard should consult the feature story in the November 26, 1997, issue of Education Week, pp. 24-28.
12. For more information, see J.L. Puckett, Foxfire Reconsidered: A Twenty-Year Experiment in Progressive Education (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1989).
13. See K. Curtiss and P. Curtiss, "Learning about Community: What Second Graders Can Teach Us," Teaching and Change 5 (2) (Winter 1998), pp. 152-167.