The School for Society: Principles for a School-Centered Reform
For my doctoral dissertation, I constructed a ten-point model framework for a democratic reform movement. My goal was to take John Dewey’s vision of a robust democratic culture and try to come up with some specific principles that people should follow if they wanted to make that vision more of a reality. I deliberately tried to be general in my discussion of what form such a movement could take, but in my conclusion I did throw out the idea that a school could be good locus for such a movement. Now that I’ve been teaching in high schools for four years, I want to focus on that idea more. So over the next few weeks, I’m going to go through the ten points of my model and talk about how a school might be able to fulfill them. It should help me clarify and reflect on my own goals and practices in teaching, and hopefully it will also be a resource for those who want to discuss exactly what education should accomplish in a democratic society.
I’ll use this post as a table of contents; as I discuss each point, I’ll link to that post here.
- Reform of attitudes must be priority over reform of policies.
- Reformers must adopt a generational time frame.
- Reformers must clearly articulate their goals and ideals.
- Reformers must highlight incompatible social tenets.
- The reform movement itself must be democratic.
- Reformers must use new technologies to build community ties.
- Reformers must operate at local level.
- Reformers must target economic structure.
- Reformers must understand and contribute to the artistic and cultural community.
- Reformers must contribute to the base of social knowledge.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.