Welcome to Cooking with Children!

I'm Doc Johnson. What I will do here is talke about K-12 educational policy, educational theory, and different ways of learning and doing teaching.

I got interested in this area when I started graduate school I took a class called Politics of Literacy from Dr. Carol Severino at The University of Iowa. It opened my eyes. My relationship with education and its various institutions had been long and rough. I felt compelled to pursue more study of schools, how they're supposed to work, and how they actually do work. I did much of my graduate work on the topic, including my doctoral disseration (Rhetorics of Pedgogy: A Study of Three Models of Student Subjectivity).

I believe that the student is the most important person in any classroom. I also believe that schools, as they are, do not do a very good job of serving students. Unlike many so-called experts, policy makers, and others who think they know a lot about school, I don't blame that fact on students, but rather on how schools are forced to go about their business.

Schools, at present, are not about teaching students to be passionate about learning, nor do they give students much incentive to pursue this passion on their own. Instead, schools are designed to deliver a course of instruction that is easy to describe, assess, and use to hold people accountable for results. Right now, teachers get a lot of the blame, but students, ultimately, pay for this dynamic.

Moreover, people, particularly, politicians and administrators, use education and its reform as a way to curry favor with the public, to look busy and take up conceptual space, so that we feel their contributions actually matter. To do this, they use children. This is why the name of this blog is Cooking with Children.

More later.