Educational injustice
From Studyplace
Let us develop a typology of the concrete forms of educational injustice that people significantly encounter in our culture. The headings below are very preliminary possibilities. Essentially we need to act as botanists. To begin with, we gather specimens, various examples of injustice in education, with an effort to identify what is in the specimens that specifically exemplifies injustice. Is the injustice educational, or something else — political, economic, legal, etc.? Describe and analyze it, and cite literature that is useful in understanding it. Having developed a collection of specimens, we can begin to classify them in some coherent way. Then, with a taxonomy in hand, we can ask what educational interventions can reasonably be expected to do about them and how such interventions might work. . . .
[edit] Educational promotion inequalities (or) Arbitrary tracking systems
[edit] Racial categorization (gender, geographic, institutional, . . . .)
[edit] Displacement of control (misallocation, disproportion, unresponsive, . . . .)
[edit] Pedagogical order
It was my understanding that our discussion from a few weeks ago on this topic contrasted two extremes of injustice emerging from pedagogical order. On the one hand, lack of order makes it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue some just (i.e. fair? - what is the content of just here?) pursuit of human development. In addition, we shouldn't trivialize just how important pedagogic order is or how difficult it can be to maintain/promote it (this is another expression of theory vs. practice issues in my mind). On the other hand, is it just for, or do we want, momentary lapses in order (however frequent?) to result in a class/group of students who are labelled as deviants and who never develop beyond the limits of such a classification. How sensitive ought we be to the complex combination of personal and socio-economic factors that go into conflicts of pedagogical order?
[edit] Gendered Hierarchies of Theory vs. Practice
After some reading for another class (Veblen), and drawing on what I remember from both Angus & Mirel's Failed Promise... and David Tyack's One Best System, I think another feature of educational injustice that needs addressing is the sharp divide between theory and practice. Also, to whatever extent there is an educational division of labor whereby women practice and men theorize - and this was the case according to Tyack in the period of "professionalization" of education at the beginning of the 20th century - we ougth to ask whether ideas we might have of a proper theory/practice division of educational labor are based in part on either gendered notions of capacity for work or essentialized gender roles.
[edit] The Use of Testing
It seems impossible to create a test to accurately measure ability within an unjust system yet testing is crucial to advancing through the educational system and creating order within it.
[edit] Many others
Categories: Justice | Stub | Concepts
