Monthly Archives: August 2017

Where’s Waldo?

In the Preface to Why School, Mike Rose characterizes his timeless book as a “series of appeals for bighearted social policy and an embrace of the ideals of democratic education–from the way we define and structure opportunity to the way we respond to a child adding a column of numbers.” Why has Rose written such a book? Because according to him, “we have lost our way” (p. ix).

It’s 2017, and we’re reading the 2014 second edition of Why School?, which was originally published in 2009. In the years since, however, Rose’s original assertion hasn’t changed: “…we have lost our way” in recognizing and doggedly pursuing the ideals of education in a public democracy and providing equity and access to all students in reaching them.

It’s as if we’re playing a giant game of “Where’s Waldo?,” and no one can find the guy in the striped shirt and the blue hat who’s sitting right there in the middle of the picture.

Why is that the case? Have we lost our way in education? And what can you as an American citizen, who is studying to become a teacher, do about it?

In your response to my post here, share the lines you recorded from Why School? and respond to them in light of the questions in the previous paragraph. Share YOUR voice so all of us can hear it. Then maybe, just maybe, we can find Waldo together.