Home >> Teaching >> EDF 3604 >> Orientation >> Topics
EDF 3604—Topics
EDF 3604 discusses the following topics and issues. Note: The schedule does not neatly follow the list of topics, as overlap is inevitable. Students should consider the following as important themes that will recur throughout the course.
- The functions and purposes of school.
- Are schools to serve individual developmental needs, teach citizenship, provide opportunities for upward mobility, reinforce existing social structures, teach morality, teach independent thinking, be a vehicle for investment in human capital, teach a single culture, teach more than one culture, be a symbol of community solidarity, be a symbol of partial exclusion, or fill some other need? One cannot fulfill all these goals, and school systems must choose which they can serve well.
- The history and organization of schools.
- Has there ever been a Golden Age of schooling, or would Bronze or Stone Age be a more apt description? Myths of ever-improving or declining education aside, school systems in the late 20th century are complex institutions whose history and structure are important in explaining the status of teachers, the treatment of students, and the politics of education more broadly.
- (In)equality of educational opportunity.
- In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal argued in An American Dilemma that the U.S. had to choose between the creeds of equality on the one hand and second-class citizenship for some on the other. Twenty years later, the federal government embarked on a program of compensatory education with the assumption that education could eliminate inequality of economic opportunity. We still debate whether education is equal, what constitutes educational equality, whether it means opportunities or outcomes, and whether it requires sameness of treatment.
- The social context of diversity.
- Today's conventional wisdom is that the U.S. is becoming a more diverse society, and that schools better accommodate and use that growing diversity for us to remain a competitive economy. That cliché is not the only way one can frame concerns about diversity and education. To paraphrase Michelle Fine, why do we talk about diversity in the way that we do, and what are we not saying when we talk about diversity?
- The process of school reform.
- Horace Mann and the schoolmasters of Boston debated the proper method of teaching reading 150 years before the current "whole language"-"phonics" imbroglio. What explains the relative successes of certain reforms (and what do we mean by success)? Why have the last 15 years of educational politics focused on test scores, the presumed link between schools and the economy, and school choice?