Anti-Oppressive Education

Oppression is proven in these first readings with terms such as “normal child” being a white, middle-class male and all others are seen as “deficient.” I do not like reading labels such as the youth all being stereotyped as “troubled.” All people are troubled, there is not a normal person around who does not feel troubled at one time or another. Educational reform needs to be less influenced by corporate businesses, because tracking and other similar practices have shown to actually hurt students educational opportunities rather than help them. Students who are not “troubled” but need extra attention actually do better in a classroom that is equally distributed between students on all academic levels.
Teachers need to be able to feel free from all the heavy pressures that can be burdened upon them and do one major thing, just teach. This seems to be becoming ever increasingly difficult because they rather have to teach to the test. Traditional teaching do strive towards equality in the classroom. The traditional practices each need to be heavily examined and the practices discussed in the reading that prove to aim towards emancipation of oppression, be kept. The only problem I guess with that idea is that only tests prove what works, so that would lead to teachers teaching towards a new test.
Kiroshimo’s reading was interesting but the use of “other” to marginalize many members of society discomforts me. It seems that this label will never leave our society social environment. Other being used in this reading is terrible, because of what I learned from a reading I had in the past written by a pre-k teacher. People are all individuals, in some aspect or another, it seems harmful for even the writer to label society as norm and other. If members are stereotyped, their individual needs are compromised. But like Kiroshima says, oppression is difficult to detect, and it is so easy to do, such as labelling someone. All students react to this in many different ways. An educator needs to be careful.