Each year Berkeley puts together an optional reading list for incoming students, and this year’s theme is “Education Matters“. Surprisingly, I’ve only read one of the books on the list. Thinking about heading the library to read more. Also wondering, what else would be a good addition to the list? One book I loved this year is Teacher Man, but Frank McCourt. Other recommendations of books about teaching or school?
(1) Book Group
It’s a plan, we’ll do a book group, starting with reading Three Cups of Tea in December. I’ll do the job of finding a medium to discuss it, taking all your suggestions. And if we find after December that we peter out, well then it will be a one-book group. But if we find we the virtual, multi-country group works for us, well then we’ll keep it going. Get your hands on a copy of the book (I just ordered mine from Amazon in the UK!) and let me know if you haven’t already that you want to participate. I’ll be in touch about it come December 1st!
(2) Government and Identity?
Anyone else read this article from the this past weekend’s NYT about Jewish schools in the UK? It’s about a lawsuit currently in the Supreme Court there brought by the parents of a boy who was denied admission to a Jewish school because he wasn’t Jewish according to Orthodox laws (his mother converted to Judaism, but in a progressive synagogue). I’m not Jewish, nor am I British, but I found this article very interesting for the questions it raises about culture, government, and education. Who gets to decide the boundaries of a cultural group? Who draws borders around who “we” (as Jews, as Latinos, as Muslims, as Americans) are, and who is included or excluded? What does it mean when the government is making rulings that shape who’s in and who’s out? Should a private religious school be able to exclude someone because they’re not ____ enough (in this case Jewish)?
People often see education as a panacea to fix all social problems. And this can be a problem, because people expect schools to do things they cannot, like fix broken homes or solve the childhood obesity problem in the United States. But I think Nicholas Kristof is on to something with this article. I haven’t yet read Greg Mortenson’s book he mentions about building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time. But I’d like to. And I’d like to support education efforts, like the work being done by the Afghan Institute of Learning. And I wish we all would push for schools instead of, or even in addition to, sending more troops to Afghanistan. Because schools are much more likely, long term, to make a real difference. We know from research that more educated women pass on the education to their children, and as Kristof says in the article, women’s literacy hovers around 3% in some of the most unstable parts of Pakistan.
Education is not a quick fix, but I think funding schools, and local people to work in them, is much more likely to promote stability in Afghanistan long-term. What do you think? Do you know of any good organizations doing work promoting education in Afghanistan (or anywhere else)? How about organizations that work with the local people in exemplary ways around educational issues?
Education is multidisciplinary and as a result we end up knowing bits of things from many different disciplines. Anthropology, political science, sociology, economics, and myriad crossover disciplines like public policy. This can make it more difficult to figure out our intellectual identity in education, especially if we are more academic than practice-oriented.
Immigration studies is an interdisciplinary field as well, pulling from the traditional disciplines much like education. Most scholars have training in one of the traditional disciplines.
Where does someone trained in education fit in terms of disciplines? I struggle with this sometimes. Figuring out where my contribution will be.
