The talented Eduwonkette scores the blog equivalent of the the talk show “good get” by having Bill Ayers guest blog a response to Sol Stern’s broadside. Let a thousand flowers bloom. But mixed up in Ayers’ innocuous sounding responses (”Stern favors teaching for social injustice?”) is, as always, the great unasked question: Who is the true progressive? The teacher, self-consciously teaching for social justice, seeking to empower students in her child-centered classroom, a well-thumbed copy of Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed near at hand? Or the “instructivist” who seeks to give the have-nots the intellectual capital they need to be full participants in society? How do we best serve our students, through opposition or access to power? Ends or means? Who is really “serving the interests of oppressor” here, Professor Ayers?
One might argue that education in America—hence the cause of social justice—has been set back decades by wrapping any number of ineffective pedagogical fads with the progressive label. What earnest young teacher, starting out in an inner city or rural school doesn’t see him or herself as progressive? Yet an emphasis on academic curriculum or direct instruction—sound, academic content and effective practice–is somehow branded “anti-progressive.” It takes a long time, and a fiercely independent streak, for a teacher to realize that perhaps they’re failing their students by accepting these narrow, dogmatic labels.
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