Are we letting schools define our happiness?

I found Nieto’s essay very similar to Michelle Fine’s essay in calling for some critical pedagogy where students discover and uncover relations of power. Of course, she takes three aspects of traditional education – pedagogy, tracking, and curriculum – and offers some recommendations that come from students, as well as insisting on the maintenance and integration of student’s culture and language. I found one problematic aspect in Nieto’s essay that can possibly be reflected in the essay by Chartier and Hebrard on the history of French education. On p.142 Nieto quotes several students on their view that education is deeper than just grades or gaining some facts from a book. The students imply that going to school makes them better people and is like nutrition to the body. I think this wonderful because I believe that the education I have received at Soka has developed my character and critical awareness of our world, but at the same time I question the students in their thinking that conversely states that someone who doesn’t attend school or do well in school actually makes them a bad person or a person who won’t continuously learn in life and become happy. The students’ perception of schooling (I assume that these students when saying education are referring to schooling due to the nature of the study and paper Nieto has composed) can be traced to the idea that Chartier and Hebrard illuminate schooling and literacy began as a way to ensure salvation and then later a more secular education where what was taught were “the things that have to be known” (p.274), including daily living habits and moral values. These students in Nieto’s study are projecting exactly what she is fighting against: a denial and devaluation of culture, language, and other ways of life that are ignored in the narrow, white, and dominant ideas behind education. Furthermore, the students will go on to believe that what they are learning in schools is ‘the correct view’, that certain types or groups of people are smart and others not, that intelligence equates with happiness, and the more embedded in social norms one is, the better person they will become.