Schooling Childhood And Bureaucracy

Features

Description

Schooling, Childhood and Bureaucracy uses sociological explanations to describe how the school system in the United States developed, and why reform is a constant. The American public school system is elemental to the reproduction of society's ideals. Such ideals in turn affect how relationships between teachers, parents, children, schools, and the state develop.

Most notably, this results in chronic demands for reform when the high ideals for individual children in terms of 'school success,' defined as test scores, student behavior, equity, and so forth, are inevitably never quite achieved. The reasons why are embedded in a tension between bureaucracy, and the love individual parents have for individual children.

In exploring the relationship between bureaucratic schooling and the individual child, this book describes the persistence of educational inequality, child development, and the nature of bureaucracy. The conclusions point out how education bureaucracies frame both schooling and childhood as they relentlessly seek to create ever more perfect children.

Review: By organizing his material around the compelling but simple theme of bureaucracy, Tony Waters brings a distinctive and potent perspective to the study of schooling. Schooling, Childhood, and Bureaucracy is a lively and insightful introduction to the sociology of education. - David Bills, professor of Sociology of Education, College of Education, The University of Iowa In this fascinating work, Waters stretches readers beyond comfortable limits to see both the bureaucratization of schools and the commodification of our children who attend them.

The tensions that grind against humanistic teachers who resist making products of their students are thoroughly explored with fresh insights. Waters challenges us to ask what the future holds for schooling and education: has the information society outgrown traditional bureaucracy in education, or will the paradoxes of the organic humanistic approaches we dream of for our schools and the cold rationalism of the bureaucratic order simply continue to intensify? - William Rich, associate professor of Education, School of Education, California State University, Chico Often those of us involved in education from the pre-school through teacher education-level of public education have a hard time seeing the big picture of why we end up doing what we do.

With this book, the sociologist Tony Waters helps us understand the place of public education in American society and throughout the world. In it, he highlights the internal tensions within the bureaucracy of education as the system tries to mold emotional children into productive adults in twelve years using an unemotional system to do it.

Schooling, Childhood, and Bureaucracy: Bureaucratizing the Child is a valuable addition to those who are trying to understand the place of public education in today's world and tensions inherent in this bureaucratic system. - John Benson, professor, School of Teaching and Learning, Minnesota State University Moorhead