Bank Street Conference at Museum of Natural History
By Deborah Young

Education’s place and potential in a democracy is an assumption that needs frequent revisiting, agreed speakers Deborah Meier, Dr. Carl Glickman and conference moderator Richard Rothstein, during an exchange of ideas at a recent Bank Street College conference held at the American Museum of Natural History. Public education still has a long way to dissolve entrenched inequity, said Meier, a learning theorist and founder/principal of Central Park East Secondary School whose books include The Power of their Ideas and Will Standards Save Public Education?

“The concept of elitism cannot be democratized,” she said. “The culture of the ruling class is a closed system, complete with its own language, and other mechanisms to keep others from joining.” School should be where students get the tools to question the system they live in, she added.

“What kind of power and education do I need so I can get my education without thinking that they rule me?” she urged educators in the audience to help their young charges consider. “Empowering students to think this way starts by honoring their different backgrounds and experience in the context of the classroom,” Meier stated. But conference moderator and New York Times educational columnist Richard Rothstein wondered if the pedagogy of empowerment makes for a stronger democracy than a teaching approach which might “for example, force students to memorize the Federalist Papers.”

“We preach to the choir so we don’t feel as if we need any evidence to prove us right or wrong,” he said, urging for more long term studies of different educational methodology. Progressive educators labor under the default assumption that if you give students an education which encourages their input, they will automatically agree it’s the best way to learn, said Dr. Carl Glickman, the Endowed Chair in School Improvement at Southwest Texas State University, who has authored a dozen books on such topics as school leadership and the moral imperative of education.

“But this kind of education helps them make up their own minds,” he said. “The DNA of a democracy is where citizens use education to help each other.”

All students must first feel respected before learning to make their own decisions and then ultimately taking the next step to help others, concurred conference participant Briana Nurse – a fourth-grade teacher at 15th Avenue School in Newark.

But foremost in her mind are the everyday, nitty gritty details of teaching in a school where 100 percent of the students fall below the federal poverty guidelines, she said, before heading to a workshop to develop strategies for teaching about the community – one of many afternoon sessions offered around the theme “Social Studies: Where We Are in 2002.”

“My students are trying to make it through the present,” she said. “For the first time last week during a lesson about neighborhoods, one of them broke down and cried to me because he was scared just walking to school. Those are the stories we hear.”#

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