In the United States, the school serves as a primary institution in regards to the education and socialization of any given community’s children. Over the course of the nearly two-hundred-year history of public education in America, the school has come to replace other significant institutions, such as the church and family, in the daily lives of most students. Children between the ages of 7 and 18 spend a majority of their time in school learning content in addition to being socialized to fit within societal norms. Joel Spring’s Goals of Public Schooling, the introductory text to the course, provides historical insight into the development of the school’s role in society. From the era of Thomas Jefferson’s meritocracy ideology where school’s sole purpose was to enable children with basic skills to Edward Ross’ declaration of school being “a form of social control” a sense of societal liability has been bestowed upon schools. With that responsibility, the role of the teacher within this structure has become paramount to the type of citizen-produced by the school system. In some ways, the teacher serves as a middleman between the higher-ups that govern the school system and the students in a transmission process, but they also have the ability to transform the ways in which students internalize normative ideologies. It is for the latter reason, in large part, that I have the desire to become an educator. Prior to the start of this course, I saw the teacher as a
