In exactly one month, Chris and my book Building School 2.0 will be out for your reading pleasure. As excited as that makes me, it feels most appropriate over the next month to point those who are interested to the shoulders on which we stood when playing with the ideas we hope will be helpful to you and anyone else who decides to pick up the book.
First off, in the battle against education and teaching’s frustrating ahistoricism, I point you to Dan Lortie’s Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study.
Most people’s understanding of the history of teaching began with their kindergarten years and ended with a collected throng of teachers in senior year. This is helpful for a personal narrative, but not excellent for knowing the history of our profession.
Lortie goes well beyond an individual’s experience in public education and places schoolteachers within the larger historical context and should be required reading for anyone who has been ever ventured a sentence on the status of teachers and their role in supporting the formation of informed public.
Even more, for those fighting the good fight today to put teaching in its rightful position as a profession worthy of esteem and honor, Lortie’s book helps put in perspective the many battles (large and small) that have taken us from living the back of one-room school houses to those on the cutting edge of helping our students be the architects of tomorrow.
For Chris and me, Lortie’s Schoolteacher provided not only a set of shoulders on which we stood, but a reminder of all the voices throughout history who did quiet, thankless work of showing up each day to figure out what it meant to build public education in America.