All teachers have a somewhat common idea of what it means to be a “good student.” These ideologies come from the common notion the education system portrays to teachers. In Kumashiro’s article “Against Common Sense,” a quote talks about the pressure the school system puts on teachers to produce these “good students.” The passage states “Many more students like M would enter my classrooms, students who were unable or unwilling to be the kind of student that schools and society often tell them to be. I remember consistently feeling quite frustrated by such students, not only because I assumed that being a student required behaving and thinking in only certain ways, but also because I felt pressure from schools and society to produce this type of student.” (Kumashiro, Pg.21).  In this quote, Kumashiro explains the immense pressure placed on students and teachers to produce perfection. As human beings, there is no such thing as perfection; no one is a blank slate, so to think of students this way is harmful. Every student we encounter comes to us with their own experiences and forms of “common sense” With this being said, each student has their own way of learning and understanding the content the school system offers them. It is also important to note that in some schools, a “good student” needs to follow behavioral expectations set by the school system and achieve various content goals set by the curriculum in a classroom. Kumashiro exemplifies what it means academically to be a “good student.” His passage states, “In this school, learning meant completing certain assignments and repeating on exams the correct definitions or themes or analysis in a strong essay format, and the closer a student got to saying the right things in the right ways, the higher the student’s grade would be.” (Kumashiro, Pg.21) Children are not set in product-based curriculum and pedagogical approaches, learning is not a one-sided process, and this is a point Kumashiro makes in this piece of writing. 

With Kumashiro’s definition of being a “good student,” it is clear that children who share ethical similarities with the people setting the curriculum in a classroom would benefit. Kumashiro states, “Mainstream society often places value on certain kinds of behavior, knowledge, and skills…What I am suggesting is that there is something about the very ways we think about learning that can be oppressive.” (Kumashiro, Pg.22)Children who are ethically diverse or have immigrated to Canada would be disadvantaged in the school’s view of a “good student.” Children who have learning disabilities (ADHD, for example) may also be at a disadvantage in this approach because they may learn differently from their peers or become distracted in “typical” teaching sessions. Understanding that education and how we teach may be oppressive and problematic is the first step towards making a change and implementing helpful learning methods for all students. Acknowledging “common sense” persists in school systems and teaching and bringing awareness to this will immensely help us as teachers to be less oppressive and more effective. History has undeniably affected how the education curriculum and expectations remain today. In the article “A History of Education,” There is a quote that was said by a professor that states, ” That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in his youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic-engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind.” (Painter, Pg.3) In reading this concept, we receive the knowledge of what the curriculum looked like many years ago. Some of these fundamentalist ideas remain in our curriculum today. Men were the ones who primarily made decisions in history; this meant typically, European males came up with the curriculum, what would be taught, to who, and how. Talking about the history of education, we need to consider that education was primarily “product-based,” meaning children would learn the knowledge they needed to graduate and seek immediate employment doing factory work. Today’s “product curriculum” looks a lot different than it did at the beginning of history. The idea of a good student remains the same, though many things in education are continuously changing. Educators are sharing knowledge with students to give them brighter futures with many options instead of oppressing them and trying to get one kind of product.

 

Work Cited 

Against Common Sense- Kevin Kumashiro

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMhySclU27gK-Vo3v4Oesfzp3dVKqG9r/view

A History of Education- Painter F.V.N

https://archive.org/details/historyofeducati00painiala/page/3/mode/1up