Institutional Sexism,the Contemporary Teaching Crisis,and Teacher Education

Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantom Books of Random House, 1970.

Spindler, George. "Education in a Transforming American Culture." Harvard Educational Review 25 (Summer 1955): 155.

Katz, Michael B. Class, Bureaucracy, and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971.

Ibid.

Corwin, Ronald G. Militant Professionahsm: A Study of Organizational Conflict in High Schools. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970.

Sexton, Patricia C. The Feminized Male: Classroom, White Collar, and the Decline of Manliness. New York: Random House, 1969.

Corwin , Militant Professionalism, p. 178.

Silberman, Charles E. Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education. New York: Vintage Books of Random House, 1971, p. 10.

I am using the term in its original sense. Wealthy Athenians of the Socratic period sent their young boys to school with aged and trusted slaves who were called pedagogues (paidagogos). The pedagogical mentality aptly fits not only teachers of the young, but all women in western civilization who have internalized the ascribed role of "guiding" the young as trusted chattel.

Bureaucracies are not necessarily "evil" things. But, like many other types of subsystems in modern society, they often become unwieldy, because they are based upon extant values which need overhauling.

Reitman, Sandford W. "An Evaluation of the Reconstructionist Conception of the School's Capacity to Make Sociocultural Changes." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1969, pp. 452-67.

In fact, in a study of congruency of perceptions about teachers' roles held by teachers of teachers and classroom teachers, Lawrence Drabick found so great a degree of dissimilarity that he concluded: ... Often, the beginning teacher is submitted to a cultural discontinuity of major proportions and rending impact. The values he has absorbed in the teacher education institution are not the values of his peer group of teachers nor of the community. His awareness that the values of local colleagues are different from, and, in some fashion, less professionally valid than those he absorbed in becoming qualified to teach is frustrating, and may even be a major cause of early departure from teaching.