Stephan Goetschius's List: Education

• • it is not some far flung, lofty goal that we should endeavor to attain, not some empty reward of praise for superficial success… but substantial achievement in little things, things in our backyards, things in and between our neighbors…
• I was moved, touched that this man who knew nothing about me was proud of me. Had I been that starved for this kind of praise? I think so
• In Detroit Summer, I was surrounded by adults who not only asked me real questions, but took time to answer mine. Grace gave everything historical context, helping us understand how Detroit had evolved into the place it was—how the industrial period and the post-industrial period affected the daily lives of people in the city.
• • definition of community
• We were serving one another. And this, I learned, is what community means.
• There were two main reasons I was good at teaching. First, I remembered, in great detail, what it felt like to be a powerless student, and that helped me to connect with the most disconnected child.
• I believed that young people could be of use—not when they got older or when they got a job, but right now.
• “The chief task of human beings is the struggle for human relations rather than for material goods.”
• “learning must be related to the daily lives of children. It is not something you can make people do in their heads with the perspective that, eventually, they will get a good job and make a lot of money.”

• The school’s philosophy is centered on Grace’s position that children are most intellectually and physically engaged when they are involved in the struggle to revitalize their community. Our mission is to nurture creative critical thinkers who employ multiple literacies and contribute to their surrounding communities.

   
• success comes from having a sense of self and a sense of purpose. We believe education is about becoming our best, most human selves.
• “the reason why so many young people drop out from inner-city schools is because they are voting with their feet against an educational system that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies them like products of a factory. They are crying out for another kind of education that gives them opportunities to exercise their creative energies because it values them as whole human beings.”
• pty vessels that must be filled with facts, the community of the Boggs Education Center will tell our children: You are of use, you are important, we need you. You can learn anything you need in order to be the best person you can. Since we are all counting on you for our very existence, we need you to be your best self—to be healthy and kind and committed. And you can do it. We are here to support you. We love you.

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• There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.
• The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world
• Equality is the most important word in Finnish education

• Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

   
• We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test
• Teachers in Finland spend fewer hours at school each day and spend less time in classrooms than American teachers.

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• It’s not really my job, in other words, to teach students what I know. Instead, it’s to create the conditions in which a very particular sort of magic – more an act of self-teaching than of teaching — is given the very highest probability to occur.

   

• Some hypotheses about where that gap comes from are some of the most controversial parts of psychology.

  • look for the controversy in your field, work there. It may be contentious, but that is where you are most likely to find motivation, energy, excitement, significant development…
• hat is what makes the debate go on and on
• 's hard to definitively assign a degree of causality to one of those causes or another
• stereotype threat

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• Dialogue', Freire says, 'is the encounter between  men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world'.
• gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular  individual, but what he says.
• In  conversation, knowledge is not a fixed thing or commodity to be grasped.
• it is an aspect of a  process.
• horizon of understanding
• the range of vision that includes everything that can be see from a particular  vantage point
• In conversation we try to understand a  horizon that is not our own in relation to our own.
• Such an opening does not entail  agreement but rather the to-and-fro play of dialogue’
• fusion of horizons
• In a tradition this process of fusion is continually going  on, for there old and new continually grow together to make something of living  value, without either being explicitly distinguished from the other. (
• ideal speech situation
• What the idea of an ideal speech situation does  is to provide us with some ways of identifying and exploring the distortions  that exist.
• Dialogue does not require egalitarian relationships  but is does entail some sort of reciprocity and symmetry
• the language we have to use is itself limited and populated, in Baktin’s  words, by other people’s intentions
• the holomovement and implicate  orders
• We are dealing with Dialogue with a capital ‘D’ here. Dialogue  is set against discussion. ‘A key difference between a dialogue and an ordinary  discussion is that, within the latter people usually hold relatively fixed  positions and argue in favour of their views as they try to convince others to  change. At best this may produce agreement or compromise, but it does not give  rise to anything creative’ (Bohm and Peat 1987: 241).
• A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based  on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the  process of the dialogue.
• rather they are participating
• the  exploratory nature of the process, its unpredictability and the extent to which  we are led by it, rather than us leading it.
• no firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its  essence is learning…
• Suspending an assumption does not mean ignoring it, but rather ‘holding it in  front of us’ ready for exploration.
• guidance, when it is felt to be necessary, should take  the form of "leading from behind" and preserve the intention of making itself  redundant as quickly as possible’.
• An organization is, by definition a conservative institution

• His particular innovation was to link Dialogue into a view of  ‘reality’ as involving ‘unbroken wholeness in flowing movement’.  

   
• Through dialogue people are  supposed to create new understandings which are 'explicitly critical and aimed  at action, wherein those who were formally illiterate now begin to reject their  role as mere "objects" in nature and social history and undertake to become  "subjects" of their own destiny"

• First, most workers I do not, for the most part, describe  their interactions in terms of dialogue. Instead we use words like talk, chat  and conversation. At this basic level it is perhaps useful to stay as close to  worker’s vocabulary as possible.

   
• Describing an exchange about the state of  the kitchen or the price of children's clothes as dialogue sounded rather  pretentious. It is more comfortable to talk about different forms of  conversation: some were 'passing', some were 'playful', some were 'serious'. One  tends to flow into another - they were, in effect, changing conversations

• There is a special danger here of unthinking application - that  of the pedagogization or 'schooling' of the everyday (Street and Street 1991).  As we have seen informal educators do not make use of a formal curriculum for  much of their work. They work in settings not usually associated with education.  Much of their conversation, as a result, is not immediately distinguishable from  what might be said between friends or neighbours. This is the way it has to be -  if they attempt to problematize things that are said in the way they might in a  classroom or in some formal session, they would soon be shunned. They have to  work within the boundaries set by 'daily round' to make openings for  conversation.  

   

• Cultivating conversation lies at the centre of what informal  educators do. It is not simply the form that their work takes, but also part of  their purpose. Through conversation, testing out prejudices (prejudgments),  searching out meaning, we become more critical. Language, discourse 'exists not  for the sake of expression alone but for the sake of the community it makes  possible among those who become parties to it' (Gunn 1992: 90). We become better  able to name our feelings and thoughts, and place ourselves in the world. We can  develop a language of critique and possibility which allows us to act (Giroux  1989: 208). We may even to be able, as Martin Buber would have put it, to  glimpse God  in our encounters, or to catch the collective consciousness (Bohm  1997).

   

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