Great minds? I just came to the Kitchen to post a few recent education thoughts from Snook and found this INCREDIBLE piece from Liza, right up my academic alley!

Were y'all following the Wizbang Blog Award race for Best Education Blog of 2006, which ended at midnight Dec 15 as a tight contest (from the same root as contentious?) between a conservative Christian homeschooling mom of six (Spunkyhomeschool) and two iconic, ironic liberal university blogs (Ivygate and Michael Berube whose mind as reflected in his writing I so admire.)

I wasn't following it until the end when it popped up on homeschool blogs and people started defining what it all "meant" if one side or the other "won" --

To me it called into question the issue of determining what is "best" with win-lose competition of any kind, but also the more profound puzzle of understanding what "education" is in the first place -- and do we really want it or fear it, maybe both at the same time?

“The Professor.”
Strange to see this educational term of ultimate respect used as a pejorative by an award-nominated “education” blogger.

I think this is a symptom of another problem besides competition run amok. I’ve long observed that we all agree education is a Good Thing but can’t agree what it IS.

Few of us are clear about what education “is” even within our own minds, and as a culture we don’t agree on one common definition of education, or how to get it or know when we’ve got it, or what to do with it if we ever do get it — we don’t agree even from family to family and town to town, much less state to state.

So School has co-opted the concept of education and set out to define and delimit it for all of us, in one standardized set of system requirements in tiny print on each factory box, specifying software guaranteed to work with each FTE unit (unless the human chip or “mother-bored” of that unit is somehow defective) to get whatever results the technical designers are marketing for superior performance this year.

That’s not Education. That is Programming. Funny that we literally call them school “programs” yet seldom stop to think what THAT means. The Professor at issue here, for example, champions the AAUP’s “academic freedom for a free society” –the one thing you’d expect home-educating families to unite behind rather than quarreling over — and his field or discipline is “literature and cultural studies.”
POWER OF STORY!

Now that’s Education.