According to commonsense, being a good student means conforming to learnings and knowledge that are set out by what society deems as important. It means listening when you are required to listen, working when you are required to work and scoring well on tests as they come across your desk. Being a good student means behaving and developing just as the school and the society need you to. Kumashiro confirms this when they say, “I felt pressure from schools and society to produce this type of student”. A ‘good’ student does not cause issues or fuel controversies, Kumashiro also points out learning comfortably with uncritical assumptions of the status quo, does not account for the learning students bring with them from other walks of life.
The students that are privileged by this definition of the ‘good’ student are the wealthy, the white and the comfortable. Painter examined India’s caste education model which uses social class to determine the type of education received, which catered extremely towards the wealthy class.
Kumishiro accounts the current model does not account for students bringing in new learning, so for the students who do not fit the extremely narrow ‘good’ student model they are stuck. This also negates all other forms of knowledge. Kumishiro also brings up a great perspective on oppression and how we try to challenge it without wanting to know about it because it is uncomfortable. This shows privilege in the sense of control over the narrative, similar to the satire videos we viewed in lecture.
Historical factors that produce ‘good’ students, as seen in the Painter chapters, is the knowledge and behaviours students learn because of societies goals/interests. These interests historically pertained to race, attempting to conform all students into one type of whitewashed scholar. In China, by studying Confucius and other disciplines, ancestral education is a way the Chinese teach. However, they were labelled and not accepted in the development of Canada’s education system and were forced to conform to Anglo Saxon ways. Although at the time, Canada thought this would advance the development of their educational ways, it turns out this hurt us as racializing education closed the door to so many interesting and effective ways to educate and claims to knowledge.
Kumashiro (2010). Against Common Sense, Chapter 2 (pp. 19 – 33), “Preparing Teachers for Crisis: What It Means to Be a Student”
Painter (1886). A History of Education. (pp.1-21)
Hi DeIaney! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I think you make a good point about the qualities attributed to the commonsense definition of the “good” student and the pressures teachers face to produce such students. Did you consider that, on the basis of Kumashiro’s method of learning through crisis, the “good” student in that light, could be the student who has accepted learning as an uncomfortable process? Subsequently, they are not the ones who benefit from a traditional style. I think it was important that when you covered the historical factors which produced “good” students you emphasised culturally dependence.