1. Politics of Education
1.1. Purposes of Schooling
1.1.1. Intellectual purpose is to provide a classroom setting that helps students develop cognitive skills and help them produce a higher level of thinking.
1.1.2. Political purpose is to teach how political democracies work. This purpose is to prepare students to go out into the democratic society.
1.1.3. Social purpose is designed to help students solve social problems. Students should learn how to go out in the world and solve worldly problems.
1.1.4. Economic purpose prepares students for their future role in the workforce.
1.2. The Role of the School
1.2.1. The conservative role of the school is designed to give each student the opportunity to work and succeed individually. This allows students to take pride in their own work rather than sharing the credit with other peers.
1.2.2. The liberal explanation of unequal performances states that each group of students should have an equal chance. Some groups of students come from an unfair background whereas other groups of students come from an extremely wealthy background.
1.2.3. According to the conservative view of educational problems, schools have basically lost control. It is stated that schools lost the ability to teach curriculum as it once was taught and the disciplinary actions have weakened extremely.
2. History of U.S. Education
2.1. The Age of Reform: The rise of the common school
2.1.1. Horace Mann stated that free public elementary education was the best way to prepare young minds for citizenship.
2.1.2. In 1821, Emma Hart Willard opened Troy Female Seminar in New York which allowed females to receive the same education as males.
2.1.3. Along with women, African Americans also started to receive an education. Although things remained the same in the south with slaves, African Americans were brought a step closer to equal rights.
2.2. Conservative perspective on historical interpretation of U.S. education
2.2.1. U.S. students knew very little and the U.S. schools were said to be mediocre.
2.2.2. Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch Jr. supported the democratic-liberal goal for equality of opportunity and mobility.
2.2.2.1. Ravitch argued that society was too concerned with using education to solve problems in the society that the problems were not being solved and this caused harm to academic goals.
2.2.2.2. Both Ravitch and Hirsch Jr. believed that pursuit of political objectives caused traditional education to be harmful in the fact that students were not being taught properly.
3. Sociological Perspectives
3.1. Theoretical perspective is having the knowledge of what is studied and being able to interpret the knowledge to others.
3.2. Five Effects in Schooling
3.2.1. Employment is bettered by hiring well educated people. People who have a good education are more likely to succeed in the real world.
3.2.2. Students tend to do better in school when they do not feel alienated. Peers have a huge impact on other students and if a student is labeled "not cool", then that can put a strain on the ability to pay attention or retain information.
3.2.3. Inadequate schooling is unfair to certain minority groups. In the Urban classroom setting, poor or lower middle class students tend to get left behind.
3.2.4. Gender tends to play a large role in the classroom as well. At the start of elementary, it is said that females are better off than males. Throughout the schooling years, males become more successful and often cause females to have lower self-esteem.
4. Philosophy of Education
4.1. Pragmatism
4.1.1. Generic notions propose that students learn through reading the book of the classroom and by doing experiments of what the lesson is teaching.
4.1.2. Key researchers include: George Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey.
4.1.3. The goal of education is to prepare students to go out into the society and be successful.
4.1.4. A teacher is simply a facilitator and should allow students to express who they are in the classroom and during lessons.
4.1.5. The method of instruction is designed to allow students to think individually and to work in groups. This allows students to possess a role in proper problem solving.
4.1.6. Core curriculum is used in the classroom as well as student-centered curriculum.