Prompt 1 - Theorist Connection: Ira Shor

I'd like to begin this prompt by raising the question "Is any curriculum neutral?" Ira Shor proclaims in "Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change" that "No curriculum is neutral" (Shor, 13). In the logic of bias, we find a strange paradox. For a person to proclaim that they are unbiased, they are subsequently biased towards being unbiased. It is like the pitfall of denial, for as soon as you reject the thought that you are in denial, you are in denial of being in denial. Furthermore, the concept of an unbiased curriculum is a phantasmal fantasy that completely ignores the unconscious prejudices that every person has. For further examination of what I mean by an "unconscious prejudice," I will direct my audience to Harvard's Project Implicit's Implicit Association Test, located at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/.

So, is any curriculum neutral? I stand by Ira Shor on the issue and will be mindful of my own tendencies and prejudices as a future teacher, because there isn't a way to eliminate bias from the human mind. Everyone has an opinion that is situated: to borrow the words of my professor, Dr. August, "No one comes from everywhere and no one comes from nowhere." Instinctively, when on the subject of opinions and biases, we are drawn to the center of politics. Shor makes several statements of the role of politics in education -- first that "all forms of education are political because they can enable or inhibit the questioning habits of students, thus developing or disabling their critical relation to knowledge, schooling, and society" and secondly, that "school funding is another political dimension of education, because more money has always been in the education of upper-class children" (Shor, 12-15).

The first quote by Shor is an examination of the subtle influences that might not be noticed as much by a general population. I wholeheartedly agree with Shor in developing critical thought, however my only criticism of problem-posing thinking (and I am a big supporter of critical thinking myself) is that it has a tendency sometimes for raising disquieting questions that logical reasoning doesn't always have a clear answer for. Therefore, my only concern with promoting critical thought early in public schooling is the disillusioning quality that can sometimes come along with it. By no means am I supporter of dependence on authority, and neither is the teacher I work with either, as she frequently tells her students the importance of developing their voice and being heard.

The second, and last quote I will examine from Shor has to do with the politics of school budgeting, which I feel many more people are probably familiar with. Much of the school budgeting comes from property tax. I'll explore more of this issue in connection to Johnathan Kozol, but the point is this: the wealthier the land around the school, the more spending power that school has. Legislation also plays a role here too: a recently proposed legislation in my state will redistribute the state funding for public schools where I live, with the consequence of inner city schools receiving more money, and the district that I once attended school in will receive less. I'm on the fence as to whether or not to agree with the decision -- on one hand, I'd love to see the middle school I'm volunteering at to have a better budget. On the other hand, however, I know that my district that I went to school with regionalized, combining two towns into one district, and when the two towns agreed to the proposal, they were promised X amount of money by the state, and ended up receiving Y amount, which does not add up to X.