Response to Kumashiro

While reading Part I of Kevin Kumashiro’s “Against Common Sense,” I could not help but remember the comment I made in class earlier today regarding the sexual education enactment. My comment, as attempted during class-time, was focused on the fact that the purpose of sexual education is still in essence to educate students about sex but I failed to adequately explain how this varied from the conversation we were having about sexual teaching. I think the difference I was trying to draw attention to was that although it is important to teach students about different valid ways sexual experiences can take form and teaching mutual understanding, there is an inherent educational flaw rooted from the beginning of our education careers if we are not taught to explore what we learn through various perspective. In this case understanding sexual experience as not static does not necessarily need to be spelled out; thinking of diversity in sexual experiences should perhaps be a normative part of education.

Kumashiro’s description of anti-oppressive education is a concept that I believe does not significantly diverge from this idea of a normative education. Kumashiro begins by describing that schools are falsely found as neutral and therefore cannot be oppressive according to common sense which makes challenging oppression difficult. In this context oppression takes hold in our education because there is no challenging oppression systems. In a contrasting way, the sexual education conversation held during class was heavily focused on the oppressive tendencies of sexual education and not so much the role of educating students about sex. In this form the role of extreme anti-oppressive education is almost counterproductive to what an idealized education should be because there is no room for the brain to grow. The process of education itself should frame anti-oppressive learning as an ongoing challenge just like Kumashiro describes ongoing research. Kumashiro’s idea of partial methods, his problematization of “good” education, and the exploration of the teacher as a professional demands the teacher to be an active and non-complacent person in order to be engaged in limiting the power of the mainstream teaching practices. This role of teacher ties in very closely to Ann Berlak’s adaptive unconscious and the reasoning that every student and teacher’s learning is biased and unfinished. Berlak takes into consideration the standing educative system, Kumashiro challenges the status quo and normative education practices proposing anti-oppressive educative experiences.

Although I didn’t have the words during class, after reading Kumashiro I believe what I was trying to get at was the excessive anti-oppression focus will distract from the role of education itself. Education should be taught so that students think about oppression on their own, rather than be explicitly taught about different ways of thinking. So instead of trying to focus on how to improve anti-oppression methods of learning, learning should be anti-oppressive and neutral, something that Kumashiro explains well.