NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Back to results
ERIC Number: EJ783085
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004
Pages: 4
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1068-3844
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Diversity Initiatives in Higher Education: Multicultural Education as a Tool for Reclaiming Schools Organized as Breeding Grounds for Prisons
Clark, Christine
Multicultural Education, v11 n3 p50-53 Spr 2004
With the still relatively recent advent widespread technological innovation in the global marketplace, leading to the "information age," massive automation, and corporate capital flight to Third World labor markets, future leaders are still needed, but increasingly, future workers are not. As result, students previously educated to be future workers are now educated, or rather miseducated or even diseducated, to be future prisoners. In 1977, Foucault posited the society as one predicated on a system of control originating from the disciplinary structures, beginning with indentured servitude, evolving into slavery and the military industrial complex, and culminating today in the prison industrial complex. These disciplinary structures impart social order throughout the population--into each family and individual--by means of the institutions of schools, social service providers, and places of worship, among others. Though disciplinary structures that employ negative sanctions are generally the least effective form of social control, the kinds of disciplinary structures the society has used and continues to use are, in fact, based on the idea of social control through the imposition of ever-increasing negative sanctions (Foucault, 1977). In this article, the author presents statistics which clearly illustrate the impact of this approach to social control on the establishment and proliferation of schools as breeding grounds for prisons. Furthermore, the author states that toward the development of multicultural education as a tool for reclaiming schools organized as breeding grounds for prisons, multicultural educators must: (1) Provide a point of entry for the schools as breeding grounds for prisons theme within the field of education by locating it in relationship to parallel ones in economics and criminal justice, among others, from both an historical and present-day context; (2) Offer an overview of the roles that the field of education as a whole, and teacher education in particular, must play in seeking to prevent schools from becoming breeding grounds for prisons and to reinvent those already functioning in that manner; (3) Examine the current curricular and pedagogical practices in teacher education that encourage the proliferation of schools as breeding grounds for prisons; (4) Investigate the educational practices of in-service teachers that make schools into breeding grounds for prisons; (5) Articulate, in great detail, what good education looks like it--the kind that dismantles schools as breeding grounds for prisons and reconceptualizes them as imparters of critically conscious learning, laboratories for the practice of democratic citizenship, and producers of leaders and practitioners predisposed to progressive action in all academic and professional arenas; (6) strategize as to how to establish and maintain schools that can and do provide the kind of good education that precludes the breeding of students for prison, given the economic and political machinery invested in the status quo; and (7) Discuss the specific responsibilities of leaders and practitioners in teacher education, teacher education policy, teacher education professional organizations, teacher education schools and colleges, in-service teachers, students, and parents, among others, in revealing and dismantling schools functioning as breeding grounds for prisons, as well as in creating the new context in which good education can be realized. (Contains 1 note.)
Caddo Gap Press. 3145 Geary Blvd, PMB 275, San Francisco, CA 94118. Tel: 415-666-3012; Fax: 415-666-3552; e-mail: caddogap@aol.com; Web site: http://www.caddogap.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Adult Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A