Question
We talked about how society largely shapes the educational system. We also talked about how the educational system is largely responsible for cultivating people who are capable of functioning in society.
My question then is how does the idea of wage labor affect the development of an individual? By wage labor I mean the sense of getting paid for the time you spend doing something deemed work. This provides the notion that your time working is valuable. And oppositely says the time your not working is wasted.
At schools we are given assignments to complete and assigned reading, which we do because we are told. In my mind this is like the wage labor. On the otherhand, many people dont go outside of that and do personal reading or personally driven research.
How does the notion of wage labor affect students interest in learning during their free time? I felt that theres something to be said about the lack of personal interest in academic and intellectual exploration. I wonder if anyone wants to contribute to this idea.
Link
Teachers afraid of student violence. A physical danger for teachers. Student revolt?
Detroit teacher assaulted in class, calls 911 on cell phone
DETROIT (WXYZ) - Everyone says it started out as horseplay, but it escalated
quickly and in the end a teacher at Osborn High School was dialing 911 on his
cell phone from inside his classroom.
Detroit Public Schools police say
someone hit the teacher in the back with a stapler, hid in a closet and started
hitting the teacher in the chest when the teacher opened the closet door.
Video
How does experiencing a different culture's school system affect children?
An Education: Three American siblings attend an experimental school in Moscow where instruction is only in Russian and classes are videotaped to improve teaching.
We first visited New Humanitarian when Danya, Arden and Emmett were being evaluated for admission. We were met by a man with a shock of steel-wool hair and teeth whose color and arrangement suggested decades of Soviet dentistry and heavy smoking. His name was Vasiliy Georgievich Bogin, and he was the school’s founder and maestro.
We had just left Brooklyn and were spending our first year in Russia in St. Petersburg, the country’s second-biggest city, where I was studying intensive Russian before starting my job in Moscow. The kids were at a private school in St. Petersburg that had a program for foreigners who wanted to learn Russian. Their language skills were rudimentary.
2 comments:
There was an effort in the late 1960s and early 1970s to think of students as workers. Famously, the Weather Underground sought student/worker revolutionary alliances. That was a highly problematic effort from the perspective of class in America. But your question about waged labor has a history is my point? Are students workers? Are professors? If school can be thought of as a work-site, can work be thought of as a site of learning? Is McDonald's in some sense a "school"?
The assault on a teacher is an important story too. I think about Bateson's "Theory of Play and Fantasy," which I used to teach in this seminar. The frame around the "horseplay" was "this is not a fight. this is horseplay" (much like the frame around Ryan's soccer injury was "this is not a fight, this is a game"). Somehow the frame shifted for the teacher, and s/he felt threatened by the "assaults" in the play. At that moment the teacher insisted on a frame of criminality and reasserted an authority s/he had apparently relaxed for the game. Why? What were the gestures and words that turned a punch into an assault instead of more play? What was going on there?
Post a Comment