An except from the review...

With Mike Rose, We Should All Be Asking - Why School?

Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose
(The New Press, 2009)


Reviewed by Kenneth Bernstein

:::In “Politics and Knowledge” and “Reflections on Intelligence in Workplace and the School,”, his fifth and sixth (of thirteen) chapters (and there is a conclusion), Rose offers some of his most valuable insights, including his respect for both the capabilities of people of working class background and for the requirements and skill of the work they do. Having come from a working class background, and having studied the thought required to do blue-collar and service work, Rose makes us focus on how we demean and diminish categories of work and the people who fill them, disconnect our schooling from the vocational paths that many of our young people will follow, and perpetuate an unfortunate historical pattern that belittles those not rooted in the academy and the formal professions. As Rose points out, this ignores a crucial part of our past. He reminds us that “Shakespeare was as popular on the frontier as in the city” (p. 68) and “My Uncle Frank, a railroad machinist, would quote Longfellow in his letters’ (p. 69). He writes that

As an ideal, democracy assumes the capacity of the common person to learn, to think independently, to decide thoughtfully (p. 85).

Further, there is a real danger in an attitude that belittles common work as mindless, that the instruction we develop will fail to develop instructional connections among the different kinds of skills and knowledge. And worse:

If we think that whole categories of people - identified by class, by occupation - are not that bright, then we reinforce social separation and cripple our ability to talk across our current cultural divides (p. 86):::  read the full review.