Reading Response 3

Prompt:
¹⁾ What does it mean to be a “good” student according to common sense?
²⁾ Which students are privileged by this definition of the good student?
³⁾ How is the “good” student shaped by historical factors?

¹⁾ Although Painter definitely relays this message with unsavoury undertones, both Painter and Kumashiro imply that a “good” student is one that is able to keep up with the class and is willing to participate fully in lessons. Painter assesses this through the lens of historical cultural biases, equating all students from a given region to Western perceptions of those cultures. Our assigned reading of his text didn’t reach his assessment of Western schools, but I have no doubt that the best of the “good” students would be found in that section of Painter’s book. Kumashiro doesn’t use this grouped method when talking about students. He speaks to the individuality that all students have, while still acknowledging that students (and people in general) are a product of the environment they were raised in. One interesting point that Kumashiro makes through his anecdotes is that even though he has had challenging students, they are not “bad” students. Where Kumashiro sees a student that is struggling to learn, Painter seems to see an opportunity to “other” that student.

²⁾ The students that end up getting privileged by this definition of “good” are the ones who; don’t have an issue sitting for long periods of time, are engaged with every activity, and conform to the cultural norms of the community surrounding the school. I think a bigger point to be made is the flip side of this coin though. You can’t have a privileged group of people without also having another group that is being put at a disadvantage. This definition of the “good” student ends up putting a lot of students into that disadvantaged category. The spectrum runs from serious situations involving students with less than ideal home lives all the way to students that just happen to have a hard time maintaining concentration.

³⁾ The few pages of Painter’s text that we read go a long way in showing how “good” students were historically viewed. One of the things that I had in the back of my mind while reading his descriptions of Chinese and Indian schools was the little bit I know of the history of colonization in those areas. When the British tried to colonize China they were met with steep resistance that eventually led to the Opium Wars and partial colonization. In India on the other hand the British were able to push their way further into the country and completely colonize it. I feel like these situations played a role in the different feelings that Painter had for these two nations. Fast-forwarding to Kumashiro’s paper you can see how different students are thought of. Kumashiro doesn’t make any mention of socioeconomic standing when talking about students, let alone race. It seems that between the two papers there has been a paradigm shift from looking at students as a group, to viewing students as individuals. There are no specific historical factors that I can attribute Kumashiro’s understanding to, but I feel like it is just the change in times, and subsequent change in understanding that is at play.

References:

Painter, F.V.N. (1886). A History of Education. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/historyofeducati00painiala/mode/2up

Kumashiro, K. (2010). Against Common Sense. Routledge.