In Praise of Schoolchildren: A commencement address to the Stanford University Graduate School of Education on 17 June 2018

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Acknowledgments

The date of the commencement address marks 50 years since I entered a teacher education program in New York City and is close to marking my retirement from teaching next year. In preparing the paper for distribution, I have kept the personal tone and more than doubled its size with examples. I have added references, mostly to papers where I struggled in more detail with ideas presented here. I thank Dean Bryan Brown for the invitation, Dean Dan Schwartz for his nice introduction that day, and Dean Shelley Goldman for helping me through everything for the last forty years. Eric Bredo and Shelley Goldman were good enough to critique a previous version. Roy Pea lent me a hat for the commencement walk.

Notes

1. On August 30, 2018, Stanford announced that it would no longer publish acceptance and rejection rates. Thank you.

2. In 2014, Meghan McDermott, Amelia Herbert, and I taught a course on Culture and Learning at Teachers College. We used Becker (1995) on the “biography of a sentence” (1995) to unpack the meanings that could be acquired by “Every child can learn.” We found that the same four words can simultaneously address many situations with varied effects, some contrary to speaker intentions.

3. Garfinkel (1956) described the basic logic of status degradation ceremonies, and Wieder (1974) showed them at work in prison settings. In different theoretical terms, Favret-Saada (1980) found them in a French community struggling with accusations of witchcraft. That each case can illuminate the lives of schoolchildren is terrifying (Henry, 1963).

4. My dialect took shape about the same time and three social structural miles downhill from fancy pants North Queens, where Donald Trump learned to be a poster boy for Melville’s critique of smart as a “paltry and base” cover for financial and political self-enhancement. I would like to direct Melville’s wisdom to Trump.

5. For various answers, see Mehan (1993); Erickson (2004); Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1988); McDermott (1988), McDermott (1993, 1997, 2010); McDermott, Goldman, and Varenne (2006); McDermott and Raley (2011); McDermott, Rutherford-Quach, and Steinbock (2018); and Varenne (2007).