Perrone's Toward Large Purposes

Toward Large Purposes

by

Vito Perrone

Purpose

our goals, guiding principles that inform our teaching practices, curriculum patterns, org structures, relationships with students and parents.
When purpose loses centrality, they drift
Without purpose they don't survive.
Purpose is first!!
  • Children are most important component in educ

    There is: Rather than:
    more concern about mechanics of reading
    learning about democracy
    hearing knowledge
    engaged in competition
    see the world simply, narrow, and ordered     		loving to read
    practicing democracy
    constructing knowledge
    cooperating and collaborating
    broadly, complexly, and uncertainly

  • Why aren't Arts central?
  • Children are always learning, that is their nature.
  • Dewey: Do we fit the child to the school or make the school fit the child?
  • We put our schools in an economic competition with Japan and Germany rather than a cooperative environment.
  • Hostile programs: war on....keeps us from connecting efforts in education.
  • In getting ready for the "real world" can cooperation be a principal objective? Think VE.
  • What do we want our kids to come to understand?
  • What does it mean: "the kids are our future"?

  • When ideals have sunk to the level of practice, the result is stagnation.
  • The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
  • Man is what he believes.
  • Be careful how you define the world, it is like that.
  • Teachers need to be like these poets and writers.

  • Piaget said: people should be capable of doing new things, not simply repeating; be creative, inventive, discoverers who are critical, can verify, and not except everything they offer.
  • Jefferson: each generation should establish its own revolution.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr: I Have a Dream.

  • Are the children being prepared for active participation in their communities?
    Two scenarios:
    In ND, schools did not inform their students about the missile sites near them. What does this tell us about schooling?

    In Mass, a school was preparing to receive 200 Cambodian children. They had a blitz of info about Cambodia and the language in preparation to receive this group. They were ready.

  • How do we act out our citizenship, to family, to community, to place of work?

  • Learning is never about isolated acts -everything is interconnected.
  • We lose continuities as we consider curriculum narrowly and in terms of isolated studies.
  • How many of us can do our best writing when we are provided 10 minutes?
  • It is the appearance of knowledge that tends to dominate our schools.
  • empowering education is building bridges to fuller knowledge.
  • cultivation of imagination should be our chief aim.
  • anecdote about Mark Twain learning to be a pilot in Life on the Mississippi
  • making new connections between things already mastered.
  • Our practice should assume some different and more consonant directions.