Choice?? When and why?
Re Choice. I just got an e-mail from someone who expresses surprise that anyone would not want choices between schools. Interesting. We’re led to believe that everyone wants school choice. But it’s more complex than that. Some surely do–for whatever reasons–and what should we do then? We have to balance lots of “goods” vs “bads” and figure out what we’re willing to trade off for what we value even more? Or how we can minimize the bad and maximize the good!!!When we pretended that all schools were simply schools–and more or less identical, and it didn’t matter that
How do we know?
Once again, the latest Dissent magazine (fall 2012) has a number of great articles on education–and related issues. David Marcus on The Horizontalists fascinated me. He asks, “Why do we think we know better?” in the context of democratic decision making, Here’s his quote from Clifford Geerts: “What we need are not enormous ideas…but ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities.”
When folks asked us what our “discipline policy” was at CPE, we said, “one at a time–depending…” Or as
When folks asked us what our “discipline policy” was at CPE, we said, “one at a time–depending…” Or as