If you knew Peggy Sue, then you’d know why I feel blue

            The concept of progressivism within the social hygiene films caught me off guard not so much because it was hard to associate social progressivism with their era, but largely because it is so hard for me to imagine a time before schools recognized social skills as a part of the experience. 

            Recently, we have spent a lot of time discussing the value of schooling beyond academics. Just yesterday, the students we are working with at Scarlett were introduced to the text they will be using in their ELA classes for summer session. What Is your Red Rubber Ball is not about learning to read or use proper grammar. Through we hope they pick those tools up along the way, what is more important right now is the discussions we have just begun with them about motivation, leadership, and aspirations. 

            The more we talk about schools, the more we pull out the purposes they serve below the surface. Dewey writes of the power of all the socialization the school provides, the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth.” “I believe, therefore,” he says, “that the true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.”

            With those whom I had the opportunity to discuss our text by Nel Noddings, Education and Democracy in the 21^st Century, the subject of learning to collaborate was very important. How can our children learn to work in the world if they do not learn how to work with others? Does math class do more than make you memorize the quadratic formula? We thought yes, we thought there was a value in teaching problem solving and perseverance. It brought me back to the workshop on teaching for sustainability. We can build our school more holistically, to include teach more than the subject goals in the curriculum. 

            I suppose what I wonder now is about what schooling will become. If education took on such a new role in the time of social hygiene, where are we going now when so much reform is being sought? I hope we do not lose what schools bring to our children beyond the words in the text.