Observations and the Iquiry Project

For my inquiry project I would need to gather information about special needs children. I would have to observe a day in the life of the student as well as the teacher. I would then compare the type of teaching used today, to the past. I would ask the teachers who have been around longer if they have seen a change in the teaching of the students. What kind of changes have been made? I'm not sure what to look for on my observations of social events. If someone has a suggestion as to where I should go and what to look for, I would greatly appreciate it.

Inquiry Project

There are a few aspects of school I would like to go into more deeply. Although I am studying to be an English teacher, inevitably I would like to teach a learning skills classroom. For my inquiry project I would like to look more into the different types of education special needs children have. I would ask questions like, how are special needs children helped today, as opposed to in the past. I would like to compare the teaching strategy of separating the special needs children to the more recent strategy of integrating children with special needs.

Teaching Against Idiocy Edited

The importance of Democracy is illustrated in Walter C. Parker’s “Teaching Against Idiocy”. Parker uses “idiocy” not as today’s understanding (“stupid or mentally deficient”), but for people who are concerned with “private things and unmindful of common things” (1). He specifically is referring to the type of people who do not have interest in the larger community. For example, they may only concern themselves with the problems going on in their own household. The problem with this is that if everyone only concerned themselves with their own private problems, the community loses its unity. No longer will anyone strive for social excellence. As a result, people may become closed in, which does not better the community. He then goes on to connect this idea with school and democracy. Before students can learn about democracy they must make an important transition to public life. As a child, they know little about diversity, which Parker explains is also essential for raising democratic citizens. To interweave different social groups in the construct of school gives students an idea of how our democratic community works. Without this construct, “[idiots] lives are out of balance, disoriented, untethered, and unrealized” and “fail to grasp the interdependence of liberty and community, privacy and puberty” (Parker 1-2). Parker’s explanation simply states that to teach democracy is to develop virtuous citizens.

Democracy, compared to other types of government, is superior “because it better secures liberty, justice, and equality than the others do” (Parker 3). This statement goes along with Parker’s notion that democratic individuals do not manifest from nothingness, and must be developed school. Here students “learn tolerance, the respect, the sense of justice, and the knack for forging public policy with others weather one likes them or not” (Parker 4). The beauty of school is that they contain “collective problems and diversity [are] contained within them” (4). It makes it that much easier to nurture democratic students with these essential qualities found in the school system.