So What? The Importance of Knowing about “Success” and “Failure” in American Schools (Part 2)
No one interested in school reform from either the political right, center, or left can come to grips with changing tax-supported public schools without fully understanding the centrality of the age-graded school organization and its “grammar of schooling.” For within that organization and the rules, norms, and social beliefs that govern daily life are definitions of “success” and “failure” that dominate both teacher and student actions six or more hours a day, five days a week, and 36 weeks a year.And have done so for nearly two centuries.
This excerpt comes from the final chapter of my forthcoming book: Chasing Success and Confronting Failure in America Schools.”
David Tyack and I defined the phrase “grammar of schooling” in this way.
By the ‘grammar’ of schooling we mean the regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction. Here we have in mind, for example, standardized organizational practices in dividing time and space, classifying students and allocating them to classrooms, and splintering knowledge into “subjects”. Continuity in the grammar of instruction has frustrated generations of reformers who have sought to change these standardized organizational forms. [i]
What is the connection between a “grammar of schooling” and linguistic grammar? Both have structures and rules that are seldom made explicit. Both operate in regular patterns. Neither has to be consciously specified to run CONTINUE READING: So What? The Importance of Knowing about “Success” and “Failure” in American Schools (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
