Last week, I spoke to a class of master’s level teacher education students at Ohio State University. I admit to a certain amount of dread whenever this occasion arises since, it seems that what I have to say doesn’t match what future teachers are expecting to hear. But that’s another story. What I want to share in this blog is a quote from “Seeing All Kids as Readers” by Christopher Kliewer. Professor Laurie Katz selected Kliewer’s book as required reading for her OSU students.
“Seeing all Kids as Readers” is pretty intense and geared toward educators but Kliewer’s concluding words about the flawed logic of segregation are powerful and worth repeating as we still find our efforts to create inclusive schools a steep, uphill journey.
Segregation as an approach to education is based on the idea that we must first separate children from their everyday convolution and messiness of citizenship in order to directly teach them through reward and punishment how to be a citizen. In this logic, only after a child achieves the magical scores of success that prove his or her competence apart from the valued community is the child allowed into the valued community. This logic is, of course, fundamentally flawed. The child either is valued or not. A child cannot find membership apart from membership. A child cannot claim a culture if he or she is segregated from that culture. We cannot teach connectedness in the absence of connectedness.
1 Comment
March 4, 2009 at 11:14 am
I’ll have to pick up that book- sounds dense but with some great nuggets! Thanks.