Editorial: Where is Barack Obama the teacher?


I’ve been a teacher for 40 years, so I tend to look at the world with teaching in mind, says Mike Rose, faculty member of UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and author of Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us and Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America. I’m interested in the way so many activities–from parenting to police work to physical therapy–involve teaching. There is an instructional dimension to them. I look at politics through this lens. Though it may be hard to imagine right now, politics provides the occasion to teach, to inform, to frame an issue, to present an argument, to provide illustration, to move to action. Right after the 2008 election, I expressed the wish that President Obama would bring back and technologically update the FDR Fireside Chat–a seemingly obvious suggestion given his oratorical skill and his campaign’s use of new media..

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