Mike Rose does a first-rate job detailing the intricacies of the academic struggles "the truly illiterate among us" face in their pursuit of an education. Presented, are vivid accounts of children being misdiagnosed - using standardized tests - and then supplied with healthy doses of remedial courses designed to "fix" the issue/s. The worst part, is that those same children continue on with remedial courses for the length of their academic career, with no opportunity to gain a valuable and meaningful education. If they do graduate, and decide to attend a college or university, they quickly realize how vastly unprepared they are for the academic rigors awaiting them. Plagued and stagnated by a remedial education, do these students stand a chance in life?Digging deeper, and thinking about the issues at hand for unprepared students, there exist a variety of solutions. Students simply need more opportunity to write, and to be offered guidance along the way. Additionally, they require the chance to develop critical literacy skills - comparing, synthesizing, analyzing. They also need a opportunity to discuss what they are learning, and to be exposed to "Western liberal learning."
"There is nothing magical about this list of solutions. In fact, in many ways, it reflects the kind of education a privileged small number of American students have received for some time. The basic question our society must ask, then, is: How many or how few do we want to have this education? If students didn't get it before coming to college - and most have not - then what are we willing to do to give it to them now?"
We figure that things were once different, that we've lost something, that somehow a virulent intellectual blight has spread among us. So we look to a past - one that never existed - for the effective, no nonsense pedagogy we assume that past must have had. We half find and half create a curriculum and deploy it in a way that blinds us to the true difficulties and inequalities in the ways we educate our children.Additionally, Mike provides a glimpse of his own humble upbringing, and the personal challenges faced in the pursuit of his own education.
Mike Rose is a member of the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He is an award-winning author and a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Education, and the Commonwealth Club of California Award for Literary Excellence in Nonfiction.
