Write an essay of 10 to 12 pages on the social foundations of education. You may writein response to one of the following questions, or you may devise your own question toguide your writing.Your paper must include at least 10 (in words: ten) sources of the attached material.1. A prominent educator says, “critics and observers [of education] raise…significantissues when they remind us, first of all, that knowledge is ordinarily distributed unequallyin existing schools. In the ongoing processes of ‘cultural reproduction,’ we are told, onlya relatively few are likely to benefit from the encouragement of free rational judgment.Most students will be trained to take their allotted roles in a stratified society. Thelanguages they speak and their cultural experiences will be consistently disconfirmed:they will be taught that they are in important ways inferior, ineffectual, and powerless.”(Maxine Greene, “How We Think about Our Craft,” Teacher College Record, 86, no. 2:63-64)Drawing upon readings, lectures, and discussions, evaluate the accuracy ofGreene’s description of schooling in America. Argue both for your conception of democracyand any educational approaches you recommend. Do the changes in educational policyand practice associated with A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind make the thingsGreene describes better or worse?2. Discuss the argument made in readings and lectures that schools have been used drivea wedge between parents and their children and to alienate teachers from the mothers oftheir students and from the communities in which they teach. If these arguments arecorrect, do ANR, NCLB, and Florida’s A+ program help mothers and teachers build afruitful alliance or drive them farther apart?3. Throughout the term, I have criticized arguments that schooling can end poverty andsolve a host of social problems. Develop this argument using lectures, readings, anddiscussions. Contrast arguments that poverty results from individual shortcomings andthat schooling can overcome those shortcomings to arguments that advocate directintervention in US economy, as occurred in the New Deal. Take a position on whethereducation can end poverty.4. Kliebard contrasts Dewey’s philosophy of education with that of the advocates ofscientific management and efficiency. Develop Kliebard’s arguments and evaluate them.Use his analysis to examine current educational policy, say NCLB.
