Another Sunday Night…
Every Sunday is the same: an avalanche of reading for the next day. My three big reading classes are all on Mondays: History of Education from 9-12, Advance Policy Analalysis focusing on Policy and Pluralism from 12-3, and a Sociology class on Power and Inequality in Higher Education from 4-6. It’s now 11:28, and I’ve got a good chunk of it done, but as is often the case, not as much as I ‘d like to. Maybe sometime next year when I’m almost done with coursework I’ll reach a point where I can watch television or bury my head in a novel on Sunday nights.
The truth is, the reading is endless in graduate school. If it’s not the reading for class this week, it’s reading for upcoming papers or reading to study up on areas of the field. Or going back to readings from earlier classes. The stacks of books on my school bookshelves are growing. I’ve started buying books on Amazon that come up again and again in my work, and seem like works I should have, and as a result the books I’d like to read and haven’t yet keep staring at me daily. Like Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”, which is a rich ethnographic portrait of class and its impact on how families interact with the institution of schools. Or Guadalupe Valdes’ “Con Respeto”, which is another ethnography of 10 Mexican families living near the U.S.-Mexican borders, and their experiences with schools. Or David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s “Tinkering Toward Utopia”, which is all about the past century of school reform and the lack of progress we’ve made.
Can’t get to these tonight. Instead, back to Historical Perspectives reading for tomorrow morning. Learning about how the modern debates we have about curriculum go back to the late 1890s. The question for my short history paper for tomorrow is “What legacy, if any, did the nineteenth century bequeath to contemporary American schools?”. Much of the structure of our modern schools in fact seems to go back to the 1800s. Dividing into grades with segmented curriculum at each level. Linking college to high school. Fighting over work-preparation goals and knowledge for knowledge’s sake goals for the curriculum.
Reading this history brings up an important question for me. To what extent was the schooling experience of kids around the country (immigrant, rural vs. urban, non-English speakers…) uniform? Was there a lot of variation in the kind of schooling experience kids had? Did school look different? At what point in our history did school start looking so much the same?