Session Update-Letter from John Goodlad

One of education's most revered sages, John Goodlad, was to present one of the sessions in our Distinguished Lecturer series at conference. However, he is undergoing treatment for an ongoing illness, which will prevent him from joining us at conference.

Reflecting on his illness, and a conversation with his son, have led Goodlad to understand that his current personal experiences mirror his prescriptions for education. He explains that in this letter, addressed to all conference participants.

Please feel free to comment on the letter, respond to Goodlad, or send him a note using the comments link at the bottom of the post. We will pass all of your comments to him.

Illness as a Learning Experience

John I. Goodlad

For the past five months, regaining my health has dominated my daily life. The accompanying hours of contemplation have had a profound impact on my thinking. This has not changed my ecology of belief, but it has made elements of it much clearer: We will not have the nation of our rhetorical expectations—the American Dream—until equity and justice for all are at the heart of school mission, public policy, and our daily behavior. This is the argument of the book written with colleague Corinne Mantle-Bromley and son Stephen John Goodlad, published last year, Education for Everyone: Agenda for Education in a Democracy. My ill health seems to mirror that of the nation.

On our way to the clinic one day, I railed to Stephen about the dehumanization accompanying serious illness. He took exception, claiming quite the reverse—that I am going through a very humanizing journey of actually experiencing the downside of being human. I was sharply reminded of my own teaching: reading, thinking, and talking about the shortcomings of my social and political democracy fall far short of addressing them.

Reflecting on Stephen's remark brought me into the parallel between the inequities and injustices in our care of the disabled and the education of the young. Because of the education I was fortunate to get from my little-schooled parents and from our schools, I am now getting the best of health care. (See my Romances with Schools: A Life of Education, published in 2004). But millions of children are deprived of the education that provides a pathway into the resources they need to live productive, satisfying lives and to ensure such for their children.

Day after day during these five months, I have listened to the conversations of people young and old who not only suffer life-threatening illnesses but also contemplate years of accompanying indebtedness that will deprive them of what the more fortunate take for granted, I among them.

As we go about our work each day, how often do we ever think about the relationship between the education we seek to provide and the well-being of both our democracy and the diverse array of human beings in its care? Are those we elect to care for this democracy aware that those test scores they seek to raise correlate not at all with the dispositions of honesty, integrity, good judgment, dependability, compassion, good workmanship, and the like that we expect of our citizens and that we expect our schools to develop in the young?

We do not need more education summits and commissioned reports to tell us what is wrong and what to do. But we do need lay leaders who sit in the equivalent of those clinic waiting rooms, participating with the advantaged and disadvantaged in conversations of our cultural infrastructure. And we do need educators—positional leaders or not—who hurry home from conferences such as this to work with their colleagues, students, and parents in taking inventory of the inequities and injustices embedded in their schools and pursuing an agenda of renewal. Even with our disabilities, we are fortunate to be doing the work we do with the personal abilities our circumstances have enabled us to develop.

Stephen was right. Although my daily curriculum would not be of my choosing, it is enriching my readiness for work awaiting me. I look forward to having the time to use well what I am learning. I very much regret, however, that I will not be able to bring to what I do a couple of months from now what I would have learned from attending the 2005 ASCD Annual Conference.

John I. Goodlad is president of the Institute for Educational Inquiry and a founder of the Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington. He is the author of over thirty books on education, including the highly acclaimed A Place Called School (McGraw-Hill, 1984), Teachers for Our Nation's Schools (Jossey-Bass, 1990), and In Praise of Education (Teachers College Press, 1997).