Evil Agenda in Education

                                              By Kelli Kenealy   

         In his article, “Is Teaching for Social Justice Undemocratic?” Scholar Eric Freedman (2007) argues that education curriculums should be built on a more individual level, based on the student’s interest. He continues on by stating that students should identify themes and pose questions and topics that they want to discuss, not what is dictated by an elite agenda. Educational Scholar Daisaku Ikeda (2001) supports Freemans notion that if we cater more to the individual students needs they are more apt to become a lifelong learners rather than a situation learners; knowing the material for the test on Monday but forgetting what he learned by Friday. This theory is supposed to be practiced in most charter schools across America (Green and Oluwole, 2006).

        While the concept behind this theory is understandable; that students are going to pay more attention if they get to choose the topics of interest. Through my personal observation in charter schools I believe that this teaching theory is ineffective. Students need to be given guided questions and subject matter in order for them to critically think and spark debate with one another. The whole point of becoming an educator is to “teach” subjects they know little about and how it relates to the greater context of their life. The teachers that I observed practicing this theory expressed frustration with this method. A more effective method is creating a knowledge foundation for students before they are allowed to be able to freely debate one another and challenges each other academically and creatively.
       In order to obtain this goal of creating an environment that enables the student to become lifelong learner, who are socially responsible and empowered to work for themselves and society (Ikeda, 2001). We as future teachers need to perform a balancing act between making sure social justice is served and creating a curriculum to improve learning as a whole, not just to one group. The first issue that should be tackled to achieve this goal is developing more streamlined guidelines for new teachers. New teachers should be given more guiding principles to help them get to know the material in their content area. “Teachers need link theory and practice with teacher education programs where students and teachers together critically analyze the social, moral, and political dimensions of teaching while developing subject matter or content knowledge,”(Ikeda, 2001). Once this is achieved both students and teachers can begin becoming lifelong learners.

Source Links:

Ikeda Daisaku


Eric B. Freedman Article


Green, P., Oluwole, J. (2006) Article

Tifanie Gleason Response to Kelli’s Evil Agenda in Education


While I agree with the idea that students need to be given guided questions and that we, as educators, should facilitate learning, I am more apt to agree with Eric Freedman on this stance. In my observations, I was allowed to sit in a class where the students did, in fact, choose the topics the class talked about and chose the reading material. In this specific instance, it worked miraculously for the students. This class, titled Contemporary Social Issues, was completely student ran. The teacher’s only requirement to the students is that each student read ten books in the semester long class. While that might sound like too much in 16 weeks, the students took to this class. The secret? The students were allowed to choose what book they wanted to read. If the students did not like the book, they could stop reading it at any point and pick a new book. When I observed this classroom, the class was 6 weeks into the semester and already, the majority of the students were starting on their fourth book. Topics in this class were chosen by the students. When I was in the class, it was Terrorism. Each week students were required to write a page long “journal entry” in relation to Terrorism and all that it encompasses and somehow relate this information to a piece of their book. It was amazing how much the students contributed and how well they stayed on task. The students really wanted to learn more about Terrorism and read the books. This class encompasses Freedman’s idea that education needs to be built around the individual and focus more on what the student wants to learn, instead of rote memorization of facts that have no meaning or value to the students.