Reading about education

My aversion to bigotry and fascism was reason enough for me to have been appalled by and focused on the school board elections.

Looking back, though, I can see where my earlier education-themed reading may have played a part.

It started with reading about residential schools, and also some references to decolonizing education and academia, but also with really responding to bell hooks.

There ended up being seven books:

A Third University is Possible by La Paperson

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks

Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire 

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and Schools Closing on Chicago's South Side by Eve Ewing

(And then also I read two comics collections and a book of poetry from Eve Ewing and five children's books from bell hooks but those were not specifically related to education.)

Things don't always work out the way you think.

Let me just mention that La Paperson is an occasional pseudonym for UC San Diego's Wayne Yang, who was an editor on a book on decolonizing education that I read as a part of my Native American Heritage Month reading. The title was mentioned in one of the sections, and I found it intriguing.

I expected that it would be about distance learning, especially in response to residential schools. That seemed logical based on the material that referenced it, but it was not. It did still have information about rethinking education. 

In retrospect, the timing is also interesting. I finished the first three before the pandemic started, but only just before. Then, as I was reading more, education had been turned on its head. Now I reflect back on it after widespread attempts to move schools back to more racist and sexist and fascist.

It has been good to know that more is possible, and discouraging to see how determined some are to limit and crush.

Ewing's work was especially chilling, as so many of Chicago's school closures end up erasing history and diversity, trying to revert to a pre-Civil Rights Movement status quo. That is shown even in the names of the schools that get chosen for closure, and the names that go on the new schools.

Yes, we have people with that same goal right here. They are organized.

Then, with Miller's work, it is disturbing to see how many programs work to actually discourage learning and reading and intellectual development. I can't swear that's the goal, but it's alarming.

Fortunately, it was all balanced with hope. Regarding the ability of other people to learn and change -- even later in life -- Teaching to Transgress and Pedagogy of the Oppressed were probably the best. For those who seek to make things better, there was a lesson in A Third University is Possible as well.

When we break and repair systems, the new systems will also have flaws; we will not get everything right. So you address that, and you find new flaws.

As much as we keep getting wrong, we just need to keep trying. 

It does make sense to clarify goals. Some goals are incompatible, and some people with those goals will strenuously avoid admitting that.

Regardless, for all that has gone wrong and been wrong, I still believe in the chance to do better.