Agency As Purpose
Agency As Purpose
Agency As Purpose
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The University of Chicago Press and Francis W. Parker School are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Schools: Studies in Education
ANDY KAPLAN
Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, Illinois
Inquiry into the subjective life of schools is a vital effort to search out the
intrinsic value of education. At a time when far too much of public discourse
about education reduces the conversation about value to the metrics of out-
put and external standards, education that matters will continue to thrive
only as teachers, students, and parents insist on the value of education that
matters to them. It may be too much to hope that reasoned conversation will
take the place of invective and the relentless search for blame, but the cur-
rent state of educational practice is so rich and so diverse that we need to
ponder and celebrate achievements rather than only react defensively. As I
have learned in my years of editing this journal, these are in many ways dark
times for public education, especially in the United States. But for all the
stories I have heard about how teachers are scapegoated and demonized,
how attitudes as well as laws have constrained the teaching profession and
demeaned the goals of democratic education, I have heard also the stories
of experimentation, perseverance, and triumph.
One of the themes of this latter kind of stories is the way in which teachers
and school programs act upon students in such a way as to make students
active. In the traditional model of schooling, the student is a passive recip-
ient of the facts and skills that a teacher presents, and the success (or failure)
of the student is a function of what he or she can retain. In stories of dem-
ocratic schooling, there is a very different notion of process as well as out-
come. Instead of emphasizing the retention of previously known facts, the
goal of democratic schooling is the creation of meaning through appropriate
and determined use of facts. While traditional schooling seeks to preserve
and reproduce the world, democratic schooling seeks to present the world
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