Eisner 6, Freedman 6 and Pink

                This week Freedman and Eisner talked about curriculum.  Freedman’s first sentence was lovely, “Curriculum reflects people’s hopes and dreams.” (p. 106).  They embody what we want our children to learn.  They embody the future.   Freedman talked again about the American “focus on individualism” as a response to worries about Authoritarianism after WWII. (p. 107).  It is ironic that we are now so focused, as a nation, on technical, scientific, results-oriented education.  It seems so authoritarian. 

                Eisner also talked about curriculum, standards and policies.  He said, “The prescription of standards, and uniforms, and national testing, and uniform curricula masks the deeper problems of schools.” (p. 167).  I think the problems in education today are so many and so varied that there cannot be a blanket solution for the whole.  Every community, school and student is different.  Political imperatives and “education reform” have been trying to “fix” the school system since at least the turn of the 20^th century.  Every successive platform thought they were right.  Looking forward, our students will need to have new sets of skills to deal with the world around them.  A world that today’s politicians and policy makers probably can’t begin to imagine, much less agree on how to prepare for.

                Eisner also talked about “helping the community understand the forms of thinking reflected in students’ work in the arts.” (p. 175).  I think this is so important in helping people see how the arts are important in the schools.  As he said, most student work is exhibited with no contextual information, much like a gallery, but without any artist statements.  Eisner’s suggestion “of educationally interpretive exhibitions that explain to viewers the features of the work on display and describe the forms of thinking that the child had to engage in to create such work…The standards attained by the child are embedded in the work, but to recognize those achievements that work needs to be unpacked.” (p. 176).  So our job as teachers includes helping the students pack their work with meaning and helping the viewers and those who do the accounting, to understand just what and how much is packed in there.  I can just imagine the conversations that student artists and their parents would have if there was more information next to their exhibited work than name, grade and school.   

                Eisner and Freedman had me a bit depressed about the whole standards/national curriculum/public education reform thing.  Then I read parts of A Whole New Mind.  Mr. Pink, where have you been all my semester? I love this book.  It made me feel hopeful about the future, not just of schools, but of the human race.  For so long, the “factory model” left brain mentality has dominated the world as I know it.  It has even crept into my work as a cake decorator lately, by way of a deli manager who would have fit in great at Henry Ford’s Rogue River factory.  She actually gets mad when anyone in the area is having fun, (I am usually having fun), and working at the same time.  She doesn’t think they go together.   Her attitude kills morale and has led to incredibly high turnover in her department.  Fortunately/unfortunately, she is not my boss, we just have to work in the same area. 

                Pink’s discussion of play was fascinating.  From video games to humor and joy, it is so interesting to see these things be valued.  I must admit that I have been a member of the “fortysomething geezer set” (p. 192), about video games, mainly because I see them as big time wasters.  That is mainly because my children sometimes use them to get out of doing chores and homework.  This chapter made me think deeper.  I’m also kind of embarrassed at my geezer-ness, because I had already decided to use video game creation as part of my curriculum development idea in my Artful Digital Technology class, but just because kids like games.  Now I can back it up with some “real” ideas.

                One thing that struck me many times in this reading, and throughout Eisner and Freedman, is the way that our public education system seems to be using standards and curriculum, testing and accountability for a future that is already in the past.  Henry Ford would have loved “No Child Left Behind”.