Rinaldo Walcott, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at OISE, spoke as part of a panel on Saturday during a teach-in hosted by the Centre for Integrative Anti-racism Studies. Here is what he had to say about public education’s relationship to racial issues today.
“Education as it is currently organized is a bankrupt project. More than renovation and reform are needed if education is interested in effectively incorporating black bodies into the process of mutual education. At present, by and large, the kinds of people attracted to teaching exhibit a particular kind of conservatism: it is a conservatism very much wrapped up in missionary discourses and discourses of policing. Thus it is not surprising that student teachers would believe that the most useful part of their training happens in classrooms. The idea of training is what needs to be seriously remade if teaching is supposed to fulfill the needs of a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. Teaching must be remade not as a fancy apprenticeship, but as a mode of thought and a practice of thoughtfulness.
“It may appear heretic to some of you, but were I to have my way, no student teacher would be caught in a classroom before their first job. The idea that apprenticeship is neutral is a patently false one. Apprenticeship acts like a virus passing on to its prey all the old and unseemly ideas of an already bankrupt system.
“…When school practices come to dominate the experience of training, as opposed to critical forms of thought and reflection, education faculties’ inability to rethink teacher training outside a paradigm of apprenticeship play a crucial role in cementing the disadvantages of formal education for many, especially people who are racialized.
-Graham F. Scott
