Course Details

Course offered Spring 2012

Honors 232 A: Political & Moral Context of Education & Schooling (SSc)

Honors 232 A: Political & Moral Context of Education & Schooling (SSc)

SLN 14434 (View UW registration info »)

Roger Soder (Education)
Office: MGH 211, Box 353600
Email: rsoder@uw.edu

Credits: 5
Limit: 30 students

Honors Credit Type

Schooling is a major enculturating function of every society. It is a deeply embedded function in a society, so deeply embedded that it is often difficult to see how schooling works, and it is difficult to raise critical questions about its purpose, design, and functions. As the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski said, nothing is as difficult to see as the obvious.

This difficulty is experienced by many undergraduate students. Undergraduate students have spent more time in formal schooling agencies than in any other agency in society (other than the family). Their very familiarity with schooling is often an obstacle. Honors students in particular most likely have done very well in school: they know how to do school, as it were. But to do well in school is not the same as understanding the social, economic, and political functions of schooling.

The purpose of this course, then, is to deepen our fundamental understanding of the schooling function in American society. We will identify and address some of the major perennial and critical questions of the schooling through reading and discussion of classic and current texts. Those questions will include:

– How do we make useful distinctions between “education” and “schooling” and why are these distinctions important?
– What is the rule of public schools in helping to create and sustain conditions for an authentic and healthy democratic regime? And, moreover, what does “public” mean here?
– Should schools reflect our society as it is in terms of socioeconomic order and distribution of wealth, or should schools-in the words of sociologist George Counts-“help build a new social order?”
-Why do some people to better than others in school? What are some of the critical variables?
-How should schools deal with the tension between liberty and order in a democratic regime? And how should schools deal with the tension between liberty and equality?
-What is the historical context of the schooling function in the U.S.?
-How might we usefully frame discussions of democracy, equality, and access to schooling?
– What are the socio-economic and political relationships between K-12 schooling and higher education?

Readings will include selections from Aristotle, Quintilian, Montaigne, Whitehead, Richard Hofstadter, and George Counts, as well as contemporary authors on the politics of schooling in terms of race, gender, and social class. We also have three guest speakers.

Requirements: Short (1-2 pages, single-spaced) summary/analytical papers will be prepared for most of the readings; one longer (9-10 pages, single-spaced) final paper synthesizing and discussing the whole. No formal final exam. Numerical grading on a 4.0 scale. Given that class discussion is very important, attendance is critical.