School isolation works to deny students a link between what they learn in
the classroom and the environment they function in outside the school,
The lack of relevance and integration is particulwly acute Tor minoriq md
disadvantaged students, whose social ad cultural background is not reflected,
or is negatively renected, in stmdard curricda based on a vv"hite,
middle-class mainstream ad on elitist structures of achievement. Isolation
aXso denies communities the integative and empowering capacities of
the school as a communi-t-y institution, IsoIation denies schools the eneraf
resources, and, ultimateXy, the sympathies of community" members.31
Community involvement in the schools can help to foster the necessary
conditions for a constructive, ongoing debate over the goals, methods,
and sewices that schools actually provide for students in specific
localities. Moreover, it is essential that teachers take an active role in organizing
with, pal-ents and others in their communities in order to remove
political power: from the hands of those political and economic
groups and institutions who exercise an inordinate and sometimes
damaging influence on school policy and curriculurn.3"
If radical educators m going to have my significant effect on the unequal
economic, politicd, and social arrangements that plague schools
and the wider: society, they have no choice but to actively engage in the
struggle for democracy with groups ouzside of their classruorns. Martin
Carnrzy reinhrces this point by arguing that democracy has not been
created by inteliectuals acting kvirhin the confines of their classrooms.
Democracy has been developed by social movements, adfk itose Intellectuals
md educators who were able to implement democratic reforms in education
did so in part through appeals to such movements. If the working
people, minorities, and women who have formed the social movements
pressing for greater democracy in our sociefy cannot be mobilized behind
equdity in education, with the increased public spending that this requires,
there is absolutely no possibiliq &at equaiiv in education wjlt be implementedes3
Teachers need to define themselves as transformative intellectuals
who act as radical teachers and edttcawrs. Radicd teacher as a caegory
defines the pedagogical and political role teachers have within the
schools while the notion of radical education speaks to a wider sphere of
intervcmion in which the same concern with authority, knowledge,
power, and democracy redefines and broadens the political nattzre of
their pedagogical task, which is to teach, learn, list:en, arzd mobilize in
the inlerest of a morc: just and equitable social order, By linking schooling
to wider social movements, teachers can begin to redefine the natrlre
and importance of pedagogical gruggle and in doing so provide the
basis to fight br forms of emancipatory authority as a foundation br the
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