From Sports Fanaticism to Plagiarism: This Week in What Is Wrong with Education
In the fall of 1984, I entered the field of education as a high school English teacher, assigned the exact room in which I had been a student and where my mentor, Lynn Harrill, had taught before moving on to a district-level job.
Oddly, 18 years later, I transitioned to higher education after completing the same doctoral program as Lynn; the odd part is that I again filled the position Lynn left to return to public education. My office then and now was designed by Lynn as the education department was moving into a new building just as he left and I was hired.
Over my 33 years as an educator, I have acquired expertise and experience in two fields, education and English, and in two levels of formal education, K-12 public and university/college.
I entered education because I recognized early that although I excelled in and benefitted greatly from education, formal education was deeply flawed. Most of the good in formal education survived in spite of the system—because of wonderful teachers who somehow rose above the system and because some of us had privileges that allowed us to excel, again, in spite of not because of.
From about the fall of my junior year of college on, however, I knew that formal schooling tended to reflect and perpetuate the very worst of our society; that although education could be revolutionary and transformational, it often was not.
My career as an educator also began almost exactly at the genesis of the accountability era that has been an epic failure because the political prognosis of educational failure was completely wrong and thus the cures have all been disastrous.
Formal education at all levels in the U.S. suffers from the corrosive influences of privilege and inequity, and since those with power benefit From Sports Fanaticism to Plagiarism: This Week in What Is Wrong with Education | radical eyes for equity: