Jane Addams and Student Engagement

I just finished reading an essay on Jane Addams, a pioneer of early 20th Century education, who was one of the first to pay attention to multi-cultural education. While her ideas have been quite influential in that regards, I also found it very interesting the way her ideas of socialized education speak to the general isolation that stems from education. Schools not only function to isolate students from their parental ethnic cultures, but also from the daily experiential cultures that their arents partake in, most notably work culture. Schools tend to provide students with a unique cultural environment that references nothing else in the lives of students except school. Addams charged that this kind of formalism prevented children from conceiving of proper ways to integrate themselves in the adult world. This also provides a unique perspective of many so-called "GenX'ers" from the 1990s who experienced significant personal distress when it came time to enter the "real world" after graduation. In fact,the 1990s saw many developments such as the "permanent student" and record increase in graduate school enrollments, the "Slacker Movement" which encouraged well-educated middle class youths to take up menial service sector jobs such as dishwashers and parking lot attendants. Even the media's fixation on something called "the quarter-life crisis", a noticable increase in the number of students who dramatically change careers a few years after graduation, underscores that even youths who made a career choice often felt it was the wrong one.

All of this points somewhat to the circular nature of contemporary schooling, although the situation has changed somewhat. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the school setting became increasingly self-referential. Students came to school and had few options to engage in activities that were not in some way related to school. The development and increasing proliferation of personal communication devices, along with access to Internet resources has given students more options and means to carry their non-school lives with them into school. Recent student engage surveys, such as those being conducted under the What Did You Do In School Today banner, are clearly demonstrating that students recognize the isolating and divorced nature of their current situation.

On Privacy

There's a lot of talk about the need for privacy, especially online privacy regarding personal information. I would agree that users, regardless of their age, need to be aware of the kind of information about themselves that they are spreading online and who might have access to it. It's not unheard of for companies to collect information as a form of market testing or consumer research without informing visitors to their websites.

Discussions regarding young people and privacy however, also tend to talk about the amount of self-disclosure that young people do on social networks. It's particularly common for older people to be shocked at the photos being shown, or to bring up rumours of applicants being turned down for jobs based on things that are mentioned or shown on their Facebook/Myspace page. This is the kind of notion of privacy that I find interesting because it seems to argue that the idea of "privacy" is a static one - that what constitutes a private moment for baby boomers would be the same as for the so-called net generation or the even more so-called "Greatest Generation" (that pre-dated the boomers). All one as to do is read newspapers from different periods and look at the kinds of activities that are mentioned for prominent citizens and what can see that definitions of privacy have changed over time.

Notions of scandalous behaviour have also changed between generations and so I think that a lot of these pictures on social networks of ill-advised behaviours might not be shocking one day, perhaps once all the baby boomers have retired.