“Good Student”
Looking at commonsense more as a whole this week I looked at how commonsense has a factor in our society of what is considered to be a good student. In Kumashiro’s article “Preparing Teachers For Crisis: A Sample Lesson, What It Means To Be A Student” she begins the article talking about a situation that she had experienced with a student. She refers to this student as “M” and how she would become frustrated with the student for not following the rules that he thought were common sense. Kumashiro states that she “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, p.21). In another way this is suggesting that to be a good student one has to fall under a bridge of what is common sense to the school board or society and has no freedom to express, and explore who they are.
The problem with the definition of what a good student is that the students who are privileged are the ones who fit into what society thinks a good student should look like. When society holds these standards then Kumashiro argues that “oppression can also result from who we allow students to be” (Kumashiro, p.23). If one gives students a checklist of what it means to be a good student and makes the children check off the boxes this is taking away students the right to be who they are and want to be. Children who do not fit into the boxes this puts them at a disadvantage for than the students who do. For the students who do not they will constantly be told their whole schooling that they are never good enough or that they are a bad student. This does not mean they are a bad student, it just means they do not fit into society standards of what they think a good student should look like.
In the Painter, F. V. N. (Franklin Verzelius Newton), 1852-1931 article it states that “the end result of life of the race must be summed up and given to the child, so that he shall be saved from repeating the errors that had to be lived through before the wisdom expressed by the ethical code could be generalized” (p.9). In other words this is referring to the fact that before there was a common sense of an ethical code people made a lot of mistakes and that they have an established ethical code and students can be taught how to properly follow this ethical code so they no longer make mistakes. So from the beginning of time people have established a common sense of what makes a good student and when students do not follow this they are seen as performing wrong doings.
