tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8787999482934202364.post3738614135772647273..comments2023-05-28T07:46:13.657-04:00Comments on social issues: Wish List for the New AdministrationLeonard Wakshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10948820385522641682noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8787999482934202364.post-55869128352959545572008-07-24T16:56:00.000-04:002008-07-24T16:56:00.000-04:00Thanks, Kathleen. Sorry to be chiming in late. I...Thanks, Kathleen. Sorry to be chiming in late. I've tried to pick up your invitation in my response to Brian Burtt's Obama video (7/16/08), but did not pick up there your excellent plea for a list of policy priorities. <BR/><BR/>However, I do think such a list might come out of conversations that make the complicating shift in perspective that I am suggesting there. I think ad hoc innovations of myriad sorts might make policy proposals far more productive educationally than lists emerging out of the current narrow-minded focus on NCLB. I think there needs specifically to be public support for ad hoc experimental efforts (perhaps inspired by Jane Addams Hull House, Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School, and other such wild-cards besides Dewey's Lab School), efforts that aim specifically to address various aspects of the full challenge of educating children and adults to live wisely and well in a diverse, dynamic, and ecologically endangered society.<BR/><BR/>What disappoints me about the current political campaign dialogue is that it is all framed in terms of micro-policies, this little perk and that little tweak, this little band-aid and that minor surgery, not in terms of an overall policy strategy for making it possible for education (not just schooling) in the US to become the exhilarating imaginative endeavor it can be and must be if we are to experience anything like democracy in the 21st century. It may be hard to translate that kind of wish into a policy list, except to head that list with pleas for public support to experimental ventures that can build educative inter-generational, multicultural, truly coeducational communities. Another item might be to fund qualitative assessments of whole communities in terms of how educative or miseducative they are--not in order to damn the communities, but in order to fund experimental energies to transform them (not just their schools) educatively. This is just the start of a brainstorm your post has prompted in me. I look forward to others' thoughts on this as well as your own further thoughts. Thanks again.Susan Lairdhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04667383748235324226noreply@blogger.com