Reflections on Palmer Ch. 4

I really liked Palmer's analysis of three types of community: the therapeutic, the civic, and the marketing. I had not considered these ways of viewing community as they relate to the classroom, and there are definitely some parallels. I found the civic community a particularly useful model for the classroom. It is impossible to establish deep, intimate relationships with all our students -- time and the boundaries of appropriate behavior do not permit it. Instead, we need a developed set of social rules that allows people to interact while treating each-other with dignity and respect. This closely matches the idea of a civil community, in which people who are strangers but also neighbors work together in a structured way. Unfortunately, the sort of interpersonal respect required for this sort of interaction seems to be going out of favor in our culture. It may be possible to teach our students some of these values in the classroom through the course of the year. This would be part of developing an effective classroom management plan.

Once again, I can't get behind Palmer's view of Objectivism, which for him seems to be the root of many evils. He creates a model for Objectivist learning where experts study an object then pass on knowledge, that, as far as I can tell, doesn't have anything to do with Objectivism at all. This particular way of structuring education happens to be common right now, at the same time that objectivist science is common, but they are not related. The expert centered paradigm of education has always been common in the classroom, from long before Objectivism took hold (students in the 1500's were not part of a community of knowledge, they were expected to memorize what their instructor told them). It is the result of practical considerations -- students are not yet familiar with the subject you are teaching them, and while it is valuable for them to form an interactive relationship with the subject of study, it is also valuable to pass on relevant information, which is much quicker with an expert centered model. The community of knowledge really comes into it's own in higher education, when the students have reached the limit of existing knowledge, and are trying to push the boundaries of what is known. I believe that in primary education, the best approach is a balance between the expert centered model and student centered investigations of the subject.