Schooling For Humanity
When Big Brother Isn't Watching

 

Schooling for Humanity: When Big Brother Isn't Watching documents David O. Solmitz's thirty-year struggle as a controversial, anti-establishment teacher in a small, rural, central Maine high school. Using journal entries, accompanied by administrative reprimands, intertwined with historical documentation of the intensifying conflict between democratic pedagogy and capitalist domination in our public schools, the author gives a narrative account of his efforts to create a democratic classroom in a traditional secondary school setting. By incorporating theories of progressive educators into his practice, Solmitz demonstrates the possibility of achieving the ideals of democratic schooling in spite of an increasingly bureaucratic, rigid, and authoritarian system.
A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. Most educational reform initiatives of the past 20 years are geared towards ensuring that the United States dominates the emerging global economy. What is lost in this rush to the top of the materialist heap is an education for the more enduring human values: creativity, intellectual development, care, social justice, and democracy. In this book, a 30-year teacher of social studies and German describes his efforts to teach for these higher human values in a traditional rural Maine high school. A discussion on discipline reveals his efforts to empower students to think independently and challenge authority, yet maintain enough decorum in his classroom to keep from being fired. He describes the dilemma of teaching to the test versus co-creating, with his students, a curriculum of genuine relevance. He deconstructs such phrases as individualized education plans, total quality management, and high standards for all, and systematically demonstrates how they mask the corporate agenda for schools and society, which aims to foster winners and losers, haves and have-nots, and is itself a source of the kind of alienation that breeds violence. By drawing upon the theories of progressive educators and his own experience, Solmitz generates a number of principles that teachers, administrators, school board members, and parents should heed if they hope to recapture the democratic imperative that has been the unrealized potential of America's educational system.