1. The Educated Person Chapter 1

2. Five essential questions this semester • Who is the educated person? • What is worth knowing? • What is learning? • What is good teaching? • What is the role of school in society?

3. Who is the Educated Person? • Varies across cultures and times • Schooled versus Educated • Great knowledge meant having great virtue (Plato) • Greater concern for “good breeding” and wisdom in everyday affairs (John Locke) • “Wide awakeness” and open to experience (Maxine Greene)

4. What is worth knowing? • Questions about curriculum, the subject matter of education • Perhaps not so much what should we include…as what should we leave out? • How are learning and teaching linked? • The role of school in society… transmissive?, transformative?, compensatory?

5. Guiding Principles on the Nature and Purpose of Education • Education is a moral enterprise. • Education is a political enterprise. • Public schools are linked to the social, cultural, and economic conditions of the societies and communities in which they find themselves. • The ultimate aim of public education is the improvement of life on earth for all its people.

6. Guiding Principles • American schoolchildren benefit from the increasingly rich cultural and linguistic variety in their classrooms. • Knowledge is socially constructed. • Teaching and learning are reciprocal and interdependent processes. • Teaching and learning are also independent processes.

7. Guiding Principles • Teaching strategies and materials are less important to good teaching than the teacher himself/herself. • The hidden curriculum is as much, if not more, important to children’s futures as the stated, written curriculum. • Teachers are agents of personal and social change. • Teaching is the noblest of professions.