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Back to School

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The Back to School of the title refers to post- school or second chance education in America. Mike Rose’s focus is on adult remedial (sic) and occupational education. However, although he writes about America, it is hard not to read this little book without a constant alternative reading of second chance learning or Technical and Further Education in the Australian context.
Literacy and Numeracy Studies 2014. © 2014 Pamela Osmond. This is an Open Access article
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Citation: Literacy and Numeracy Studies (LNS) 2014, 22, 4180,
http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/lns.v22i1.4180
LITERACY & NUMERACY STUDIES VOL 2 2 NO 1 2014
69
REVIEW
Back to School
A Review by PAMELA OSMOND
BACK TO SCHOOL: WHY EVERYONE DESERVES A
SECOND CHANCE AT EDUCATION
By MIKE ROSE
The New Press, New York, 2012
ISBN 978-I 59558-786-2
The Back to School of the title refers to post- school or second
chance education in America. Mike Rose’s focus is on adult remedial
(sic) and occupational education. However, although he writes about
America, it is hard not to read this little book without a constant
alternative reading of second chance learning or Technical and
Further Education in the Australian context.
The book is based on interviews with a number of students and
teachers in community colleges and adult education programs across
America. Rose’s style is anecdotal. He writes movingly of the
students who have taken this second chance at learning. Australian
language and literacy practitioners will recognise many of our
students among the vignettes he presents to us. Rose was once a
remedial teacher in the community education sector and the warmth
and empathy with which he writes reflects this. The book opens with
Henry telling us that ‘you might discover somebody you never knew
you were. That’s basically what happened to me when I started
taking classes here’.
Rose’s style is deceptively populist. These moving vignettes are
of working class and under-class Americans who are in the process of
re-inventing their lives. Heart-warming stories. However, they serve
to highlight a powerful political message concerning the malaise of
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LITERACY & NUMERACY STUDIES
much of America’s adult education sector and the policies that drive
it. Through the voices of these students, Rose makes the case for
the transformative effect which education can have on a sector of the
population that doesn’t make it to the Ivy League universities. The
sub-title of the book is ‘An argument for democratizing knowledge in
America’. The knowledge he looks for is that which is provided by a
liberal, humanist education, not that which is now offered to the
already educationally disadvantaged of America.
The book is a strident lament for the shrinking possibility of a
second chance at a real education for these adults ‘partly because of a
damaged and unstable economy but more so because of our political
response to the economy(p xiii).
It is sprinkled with case histories of people such as Henry (who
discovered somebody he never knew he was). Henry was in a
wheelchair, the tragic result of ‘doing young, foolish, dumb stuff’.
His goal now is to work with teenagers such as he once was, who are
‘searching for an identity’(p 1). Some of the stories are of young
people who, like Henry have been through the criminal justice system,
but most are of people who for a mix of systemic and personal issues
didn’t do so well at school. These stories parallel closely those of our
Australian students in the range of adult literacy, language or basic
education classes.
Also reflected in the Australian context are the range of hurdles
placed in the way of these students and potential students which
include the overly bureaucratic enrolment procedures and the
difficulties for educationally disadvantaged and disaffected people
navigating their way through a complex web of offerings and
institutions to find the course best suited to them . He argues also
against reductive assumptions about learning which are reflected in
the curricula, workbooks and online exercises. He sees in them an
atomistic approach that has not kept pace with contemporary
understandings of language and learning.
A further echo of the Australian context is Rose’s description of
the many short term job seeking programs offered in the community
education sector. He provides a trenchant critique of the argument
that an increase in basic occupational skills will lift the country’s
productivity. This, he sees as blame shifting and argues that this short
term training in job seeking strategies or basic skills doesn’t make an
REVIEW: BACK TO SCHOOL
OSMOND
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appreciable difference in helping people to get a shrinking number of
jobs. Whilst accepting the argument that second-chance programs
can enhance employment prospects, Rose wants to move the focus to
the number of other personal, social and civic benefits that can flow
from educationally rich curricula and programs.
He discusses the binary polemic’ in the division between
vocational and academic courses of study and seeks to enhance the
liberal studies possibilities in a vocational curriculum, including
humanistic, ethical and aesthetic dimensions. He shares with us the
stories of a number of students in a particular vocational college
where liberal arts electives are possible and shows us the intellectual
and imaginative possibilities that this gives rise to. However, such
programs are rare and the economic imperative threatens them also.
Publication of this book is timely with the OECD Programme
for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)
results released in 2013. Back to School presents a counter to
PIAAC’s raw statistical data. It presents the rich data that looks to the
personal stories behind the statistics. As Rose reminds us, ‘[In the
statistical data] there’s no reflection of the lady coming to class to
keep her mind alert, of the man’s posture changing over time as he
begins to decode print’ (p 53). Rose’s stories demonstrate the hunger
of many educationally disadvantaged people for what education
promises. “To learn more … to have a better life … to learn new
things I never thought of before(p 69). It is unlikely that these
dreams will be realised by short term job skills programs.
‘What we lack in the reports’, says Rose, ‘is the blending of the
statistical table with the portrait of a life.’ Back to School provides
that portrait.
Mike Rose’s most salutary words need no further commentary:
The de facto philosophy of education we do have is a strictly
economic one. This is dangerous for without a civic and moral
core it could easily lead to a snazzy twenty-first-century
version of an old and shameful pattern in American education:
working class people get a functional education geared only
toward the world of work.
For all the hope and opportunity they represent, our initiatives
lack the imagination and heartbeat that transform institutions
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LITERACY & NUMERACY STUDIES
and foster the wondrous, unrealized abilities of the full range of
our citizenry. (pp 141-2)
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