Education is Politics

In the reading this week, “Empowering Education” by Ira Shor, she argues that classrooms should have a more democratic environment. The issue that the education system has now is that students are brought up in a traditional classroom environment. Students are forced to spend 12 years in school. Hypothetically speaking, if they were to spend all 12 of those years sitting in a classroom with a teacher standing in front of them, where they needed to raise their hand every time they wanted to speak, it’s only natural that students get sick of school and also sick of authority. If people are only taught the power of authority, rather than what it is like to live in the society that school is supposed to be preparing them for, then are we really prepared for when we graduate from high school to step out in to the real world in a democratic society? Seniors in high school, eighteen years old, are still being expected to ask before they go use the bathroom or step outside of the classroom. That seems a little bit absurd to me. Classrooms aren’t formed around democracy the way that our society is. The classroom should be made in to a more enjoyable thing, because it’s such an important thing. Why does education have to be something that is made negative because of the way that many classrooms are set up and students have absolutely no freedom? A lot of times students are placed in classrooms are expected to sit for hours on end and just listen. Because students learn in all different ways, it’s not realistic to expect that form of teaching to get through to all students. Students should be able to have more of an engaged learning environment, because most times that’s the best way of getting information to stick. It’s a lot easier for most people to learn if they’re involved than if they’re sitting there with thirty other students trying to retain hours’ worth of information that the teacher is spewing at them. It just seems as if there has to be a better more enjoyable classroom setting than many of the ones we have.  I selected the following video because he discusses the things that are important about education and how students learn best.