Today in class we discussed Alberta Education Elites. I think that the word elite has been sabotaged by my background in social studies. Every time we discuss elite in social it usually tends to turn out that those people aren't good. Think about the Tzar's of the "Soviet Union", the elite in Germany, the controlling people who want to use their power to benefit themselves.
The elite seemed to always do what they wanted and the common person always got excluded or abused in the situation. So when in class today we discussed the "Educational Elite" I immediately got my back up and wondered what their motives were. I am extremely skeptical of these people who were perhaps classifying themselves as this, now perhaps Prof Runte just named them this in passing but look at the influence it had on my perception of this group. It is shocking how 1 word can create such a feeling to arise.
The importance of word choice is apparently way more important than I had thought. Perhaps this is why presidents, CEOs,... have their speeches written for them. They don't have time to spend hours on every word that is involved in that sentence, paragraph, speech...
I need to look deeper into why this word has so deeply altered my opinion of this group. What was it about the word "elite" that has created this feeling? Elite?? is it the social background? high school experiences? sports? I am honestly shocked at how I felt immediately towards this group even though they may have great knowledge and be the best of the best (hence elite) but why this feeling? Maybe a symbolic interactionalist needs to take a look into my history and see why I have these feelings.
Elite... Evil?!?! What does it mean to you?
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Just a thought, but your reaction to the word elite might be a result of not being part of the elite. If you were part of the elite you might have a very different perspective.
ReplyDeleteQuestion is how are you going to portray elites to your students? Will they experience the same reaction to the word that you do?
Interesting thought... I could see that, but for me I am not going to be able to agree with it. We can definitely have a discussion about this before class 1 day :) It would take to long to try to explain!
ReplyDeleteThe phrase Education Elite was intended to identify the group that decided education policy -- and this one group made all the significant decisions for 35 years, until deposed by the Progressive Conservatives -- a political elite. The PCs argued that they held a mandate from the voters, whereas no one had elected the education policy makers that had had everything their own way for decades.... But personally, I didn't vote for the PCs, and I LIKED the policies of the education elite...they were the good guys in my book -- but as David said, as an educator myself, I'm kind of biased to be pro-education, elite and all.
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