Defense Against the Dark Arts: Do You-Know-Whose Side School Is On?
Ministry supervisor Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter's Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom made the difference between School and Education crystal-gazing clear.
[quote=JK Rowling in Order of the Phoenix]- "This is School, Mr. Potter. Not the Real World," she said softly.
- "So we're not supposed to be prepared for what's waiting out there?"
- "There's nothing waiting out there . . .
who do you imagine wants to attack children like yourselves? If you are still worried, if someone is alarming you with fibs, I would like to hear about it. I am your friend. Now kindly continue your reading."[/quote]
I had to blog this while the Stupid Girls debate is on, because I consider JK Rowling's cultural smarts to reach far beyond Stupid Girls and the Tyranny of Thin. Having read every Harry Potter book at least once, I'd argue that the Culture of Schooling is a specialty of Rowling's. I'd argue that Order of the Phoenix would make a first-class focus for modern citizenship education throughout all worlds muggle and magical, in any language.
Are we just a pretend world of fashionable thought, obsessed with trying to look and feel smart for each other, neglecting and perhaps unable to actually BE smart and DO smart?
Pink, Oprah and JK Rowling fighting "Thin is in" face stupidity both cultural and critical, a telescoping of intellect and imagination into a one-dimensional reflective surface, thinking selves starved for sustenance, belief and skepticism simultaneously out of whack in their daily diet of thought, causing chronic, clumsy, often crippling cultural malnourishment of epidemic proportions.
These all are problems that public education should be building cultures to combat, not to cement.
But in dispiriting fact, the standard-narrowed, uncertainty-fearing, control-freakish Culture of School works in the opposite direction from open science cultures that celebrate real smarts. If critical thinking is brain food, school is anorexia.
Time-wind back like Hermione to see when my alter ego MisEducation first played with this theme, riffing on three real world lessons:
1. What matters in life is learned outside the classroom.
2. Individuals are not interchangeable.
3. Life isn't fair, rules are made to be broken, and
there's nothing "magic" about numbers.
There's little left about the culture of school that fosters the scientific method of inquiry, so why would we fancy school a fit environment for real world-class science education --in fiction or fact? Are we too stupid to let go this fiction that Defense Against the Dark Arts, whatever that proves to be in our very real post-9-11 culture, is just textbook theory and not the real world?
At least in the Culture Kitchen, where we're literate, learned, believers all in free liberal public education as real Defense Against the Dark Arts, we're not Stupid Girls. Here we can be Smart Women inclined to critically consider public education models that don't even WANT to look old school, win an agency contract and pose for money -- such as the nonprofit online Public Library of Science.
PLoS is more public, more education, more current, more real culture of science than schooling can fake. It really is a free, open culture of intellectual inquiry where private minds like mine can learn, not society's public ministry compelling intellectual performance and preferring gloved-wand government controls to diversity and free thought.
Liza Gross in this PLoS feature brings the light and the heat.
Asked since 1985 whether “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals
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Convulsions on the floor
Submitted by JJ Ross on 20 April 2006 - 3:06pm.
. . .but because I'm laughing, and in a good way.
Sea, you just tickle me with your openness to foreign cultures, as you picture "homeschooling" must be (for my part, meeting a Harry Potter virgin is VERY foreign, but I'm open to hearing about how you've abstained so well for so long!)
Let's do leave aside worship as the point of homeschooling, rather than independent learning, shall we? --
then I think you do get this, much more than you recognize. Our unschooling life in the creative class is probably so close to your family's in most everyday-culture ways.
My current convulsing is Snoopy supper-dance delight, because I just realized I'm gonna get to share your discovery of this from its beginning, of what you already know and do that you don't know you know and do, how wonderful your life already is and how it gets better in leaps and bounds even without your trying.
ASk me ANYTHING, I love to tell stories about thinking and learning and schooling, but to cut to the chase -- you're right that we all need real resources for real education, and I don't mean taxes and laws and paychecks. School as you and I knew it was already in decline then, as labor unions are. You and I are using the elephant in education reform's living room right now. The Internet will soon transform schooling to where we won't recognize it and that's not because of "homeschooling" or politics. But there's so much more. Cognitive science is exploding along with all science. I'm learning faster right now than I ever did in school or college, for example -- imagine how much more true that will be for your kids as adults. Can you even imagine how they will parent and educate THEIR kids?
Today's homeschool constructs are mere stopgaps cobbled together in a sea of school experiments and escapes, none of which are mainstream or permanent, nor should they be. Home education is just one (albeit wonderful for us) little label for one piece of our breakneck intellectual change. The world is well underway transforming from the left-brained, test-tailored Information Age (and all it valued and "taught" in school) to what I suspect your family and mine find MUCH more culturally comfortable, the Conceptual Age with its six major values: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.
See A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink (who wrote Free Agent Nation before that) and let's keep talking and thinking about today and tomorrow together.
School is so last century!
;-)
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Probably Should Add
Submitted by JJ Ross on 20 April 2006 - 3:48pm.
that we're not home that much.
One thing that makes my family's unschool lifestyle so easy and so much fun is that I don't have to work for a paycheck or rustle up clients to keep a business afloat. For all practical purposes, I retired from my career soon after becoming a mom and I do know that's not practical for most moms, nor desirable for many. We are not rich but feel rich; we spend all the money and time we have on what we love and fill our lives with it: books, music, movies, laughter, little trips and serendipities. I resent what I'm paying for insurance of all kinds, mostly health, but other than that -- few mandates to curse, no status symbols to covet or support against my will.
Another thing is that we live in a college town, with good real world resources and good weather most of the time (well, except for the hurricanes, which have been a bit TOO educational!) Big enough to have places worth being, small enough to get there, get in and out, and be reasonably safe and free doing it all.
It's time to leave right now, because my unschooled daughter has discovered college and naturally is taking only what she loves -- so I can't pry her away from the campus (which is across town) and she hasn't bothered to learn to drive yet, since she already feels so free and independent. It's just so DIFFERENT to be with kids who don't live their lives by and for schooling, at least not until they discover they like it and beg for it!
I wouldn't have believed it myself, honestly.
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Technical troubles but no convulsions!
Submitted by JJ Ross on 23 April 2006 - 4:01pm.
So here's what CK blogger Nance Confer wrote and couldn't post herself -
Subject: No convulsions here
Well, very few.
JJ, of course, explains it all very well (Hi JJ! ) but I thought I'd add my 2 cents too.
We are also unschooling in FL. (Warning: There are all sorts of unschoolers -- including some who will yell at you about how exactly you should unschool. We are not that sort of unschooler. We are discovering what we mean by it and hope you will too.)
Yes, people have to work to eat and pay the mortgage. But our lives are our own and we can structure them to make things possible. We can, at least, make sure our children know this.
So, yes, I am a SAHM. And, yes, we are broke most of the time. And, yes, I wish my car was new and completely reliable. I wish all the bills always got paid on time. I wish I had savings. If I had a job, maybe some of those things would happen.
But then I wouldn't be at the library with my daughter on a Tuesday morning. I wouldn't be at the beach with a group of unschoolers on a Thursday afternoon -- just having fun. I'd have to ask permission to take my son to the Tae Kwon Do event he wants to attend, to miss "school."
Now, we aren't missing anything. Everything "counts." Everything is real -- not separated into "school" and "real life."
And there are a whole lot of people who don't get that. They've always gone to ps and always will and that's normal and that's what they get pats on the back for doing. Stepping outside of that "normal," you lose a lot of the social confirmation, the pats on the back.
Maybe you've experienced this when you made the "radical" choice to use a charter school? "How can you put your child in this risky situation?"
As if, by playing by the rules and attending the local traditional ps and putting up with all the garbage that entails, somehow our children will be "safe."
We all want our kids to be safe and happy and to function well in the world. To do some good in the world. But too many of us have been sold the bag of goods that there is only one path to that end. And fear prevents any deviation.
So, charter school or unschool or any other different choice, hello fellow deviant!
Well, I've rambled on but do feel free to ask anything about unschooling and, also, please tell us about your charter school choice. How is it better than the traditional ps in your area? Still test driven (my focus lately)? Smaller classes? Individual attention?
Nance
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The Deviant's Advantage
Submitted by JJ Ross on 23 April 2006 - 6:59pm.
"Fellow deviant" reminds me of another book by a couple of futurists that fits this conversation. It's aimed at entrepreneurial culture-changing but reflects the deviant's advantage in education culture-changing, too.
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I changed the date on this one because
Submitted by liza on 20 April 2006 - 4:08pm.
I had intended to promote it to the front page yesterday and it never happened.
'Tis another tech note I have to write for the crew
With that in mind, I have to come back to read the whole thing. I just saw the Goblet of Fire the other day. Wow. Talk about dark.
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Dark Even For Grownups
Submitted by JJ Ross on 20 April 2006 - 11:11pm.
Just saw this long feature in my old hometown paper - excerpted below is the part about how juvie fiction can be very real world even for adults, and notice it relates to Pink's Power of Story:
Raymond E. Jones, a professor of English at the University of Alberta, based one of his most popular literature courses on the Harry Potter series. The waiting list to get into his course was equal to the class roster. In class, Jones addressed reasons why Rowling’s series has such a profound impact on adults.
“C.S. Lewis once remarked that no children's book was worth reading at 10
that was not equally, and sometimes far more, worth reading at 50,
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Oh! It's not HOME school
Submitted by sea on 21 April 2006 - 8:16pm.
Oh! It's not HOME school it's UN school! and ... you say ...
[quote]My current convulsing is Snoopy supper-dance delight, because I just realized I'm gonna get to share your discovery of this from its beginning, of what you already know and do that you don't know you know and do, how wonderful your life already is and how it gets better in leaps and bounds even without your trying.[/quote]
That is something I can occasionally get a glimpse of and then it is tucked away somewhere because nobody is (except you now) out there telling me we're doing just fine ...
Yesterday we called in "well" and stayed home. It was awesome.
I'll be back to talk. That book is on my list. Thx.
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LOVE it!
Submitted by JJ Ross on 21 April 2006 - 10:10pm.
Absolutely LOVE it . . . and good for you, all!
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Haven't yet read Potter.
Haven't yet read Potter. Waiting for my kids to want to read it so it can be new.
So some of the references you use are lost on me.
Have been a stupid girl once or twice and let jerkoffs take my picture naked ... for free ...
I think schools are the training ground for holding society in place (not in a good way.) By that I mean not just training kids to be good consumers but also to be workers, producers for the profits of the owning class. This serves to hold capitolism in place--which only survives through keeping racism and classism alive.
So, as capitolism gasps its last breaths, ever more desperate measures are to be taken.
"...who do you imagine wants to attack children like yourselves? If you are still worried, if someone is alarming you with fibs, I would like to hear about it. I am your friend. Now kindly continue your reading."
Why did Bush visit a science magnet school earlier this week?
Lying to Children links and discusses the answer to that question ... over at LatinoPundit
Bush told the young people that they better study hard or they would lose their future jobs to China and India. Oh wow ...
There has to be more resource for parents if we are to homeschool our young people. I was basically ignored by my parents and it's very difficult for me to break out of doing that very same thing to my children. My mind wasn't valued by them OR by my public school. So a hang up I have, and am working on beleive me, is to overcome that hurt and not ACT IT OUT on other people as well.
What I mean is because of the way I was hurt I often struggle to be really interested in what a young person is learning about and what they're thinking. I'm using my own listening tools with a peer counselor to discharge through that. Meanwhile, I'm sure there are others out there, like me (after all what is adultism?) who would really struggle to homeschool.
And it isn't good for a young person to be with someone who has a lot of distress around being genuinely interested in their thinking and their learning processes.
I'm not saying I'm a basket case just that this is where I am challenged.
The other thing about homeschooling is folks need to be working to meet financial needs. That is when the public school--in all its possible shittiness--gets the young person as captive audience whether the parent likes it or not.
Now, one thing to remember is teachers are human beings and are often able to be creative enough to nurture the human within the young person despite the system being corrupt.
I do feel this is the case at Trillium Charter School. I think the staff, as most anyone in my opinion, need more awareness on racism and classism. I would love to see listening exchanges being used by staff ... but meanwhile they are loving my children and for certain hours of the day I am not the only one in their lives supporting their vibrant growth and development.
Any of this indicating I get what you're talking about or am I way out there somewhere? :-)
I think there definintely needs to be more support for parents for families. For starters ending the isolation between families. I see some homeschool circles doing this (I mean outside of the religious homeschoolers which doesn't attract me.) You can actually show up somewhere and be with other homeschoolers and go for walks or take specific classes. I don't do well with the home-alone routine. (sometimes to chill but hey, I need the contact with other families in a big way.)
I'll keep listening to you. I'm interested in details on what it's like for you to homeschool and how you keep from having convulsions on the floor. :-)