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Friday, July 27, 2012

The Golden Rule vs Stop and Frisk! « Deborah Meier on Education

The Golden Rule vs Stop and Frisk! « Deborah Meier on Education:


The Golden Rule vs Stop and Frisk!

My eye was caught by Alan Chartok’s comment about “stop and frisk” in my local The Columbia Paper: “If you ask the general population their opinion, you had had better believe that they’ll tale the stop and frisk as long as it is someone else whose being frisked.”
Is there anything that schools can do that would help citizens understand the trouble with this kind of thinking. In a racist society–one in which the odds are that the white majority lives largely separated from th people of color, this kind of “them” and “us” thinking survives without much trouble, politically at least. It would have to be a pretty powerful kind of schooling for this “habit of mind” to wither away and truly be replaced with the one virtually all subscribe to: don’t do unto others….etc.
In general the reason we focus on “habits of mind” at CPE/MH et al is precisely because they are so powerful–


Do unto others as…continued

Maybe the two scholarly studies below address: How can schools influence the habit of imagining oneself in other shoes–and rethinking ones ideas and actions based on it?
Listening to a Challenging Perspective: The Role of Interruption
by Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon
Taking up an issue explored by John Dewey, Austin Sarat, and Walter Parker, as well as many others, I continue my study of the conditions under which people choose to listen to a perspective that challenges their