The Humanization of Schooling

Abstract

The author identifies and analyzes four crucial points of entry into established practices of schooling and supporting rationales for those who would be change agents in humanizing schooling: 1. The value assumption concerning the human self that undergirds traditional American culture and schooling is that of a reactive, plastic, and environmentally determined object. This assumption runs counter to images of a proactive self that incorporate the fact and feeling of potency to act freely and responsibly in congenially shaping its world as a central aspect of being human. 2. The intellectualist ideology, prevalent throughout academia, excludes as inappropriate the expression and cultivation of feeling, emotion, aspiration, and volition in programs and processes of schooling. The desirably human integration of cognition, feeling, aspiration, and volition thus fails of support there. 3. An elevation of expert authority has colluded with bureaucratic organization of roles and relationships in schools to fragment, amoralize, technicalize, and depersonalize educative processes. 4. The traditional view of education as the transmission of a cultural heritage to the young and the alienated must yield to a conception of education as personal and cultural renewal, in and through community, if schooling is to be humanized.