Book Club Presentation Notes

Book Club Presentation on Lives on the Boundary

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Print.

Overview

            For our book club, we read Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared by Mike Rose. In this book, Rose uses the genre of memoir to present his argument about the education system and its failure to fully realize the potential of marginalized groups of students. He maintains that students are ill-equipped to succeed in the current education system because of rigid sorting of students by socio-economic status and perceived capability, and increasing emphasis place on standardization. By presenting his own personal experience in the American education system as both a student and an educator, he manages to uniquely illustrate the problems in the education system in ways that humanize the students he discusses. In another, typical academic book, this population of student would otherwise be rendered as statistics and generalizations. Rose uses narrative to vividly paint the faces and lives of the marginalized. This almost novel-like experience makes the theories and arguments he presents extremely accessible to a broad audience. Although his primary audience may be fellow educators and policy makers, his chosen medium lends itself to a general audience of anyone interested in the problems in our education system and possible solutions of fixing it.

Freire’s Theory of Literacy Education Made Human

            While Rose’s describes examples of sponsors of literacy, the influence of Paulo Freire’s theory of literacy education in his work is also unmistakable. The way Rose describes the education system in America is reminiscent of Freire’s banking concept of education. Although he never uses the term “banking system” (and instead uses the term “canonical approach to education” (237), Rose describes our education system in a very Freirian manner and uses similar methods to attempt to help his students. Here are two examples.

1.     In Rose’s discussion of a fellow vocational education classmate, Ken Harvey, and his insistence that he just wanted to be average, Rose writes, “If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational track, the options you’ll have to deal with this will be constrained in certain ways: You’re defined by your school as “slow”; you’re place in a curriculum that isn’t designed to liberate you but to occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train you, though the training is for work the society does not esteem” (Rose 28). The product of this conditioning is what Freire refers to as the banking system’s reinforcement of “men's fatalistic perception of their situation” (Freire 85).

2.      While Rose was participating in the Teacher Corps, Rose and his colleagues used a method very similar to Freire’s problem-posing method. While teaching the English to Spanish-speakng adults, Rose and his fellow interns would “ask [the students] what current problems they were having in their communities or on their jobs and try to structure the conversation accordingly” (Rose 130).

 

Some Questions for Discussion

o   What are some solutions for fixing the banking system?

o   How can we balance the need for statistical assessment with humanistic approach to education?

o   What did you think about the writing style/tone?