Capability Approach/classroom education

I am participating not as a class member, but rather as a friend/follower and would like to thank everyone for opening up the blog.
The major difficulty I see in capability approach is moving beyond our own authoritarian tendencies. For example, I now live in a rural state in upper New England with a total population of 1.3 million people. As in many rural states, significant pockets of poverty exist with individuals who proudly do not "fit" in to the status quo. I was shocked one day when reading the local newspaper and saw one of the communities held a "hillbilly day". I went to class the next day and asked my students about this and they explained to me that the identification as a "hillbilly" was a snub to mainstream society who frequently looks down upon them. When you drive around and live in rural areas, you find a completely different culture than what exists in urban and suburban America. Returning to our personal authoritarian tendencies - how many of us do make judgements concerning those who live in poor, rural areas? And as a result of marginalizing the rural poor, end up completely ignoring their existence or worse just feeling superior to those ignorant hillbillies? This phenomena is occurring on all levels of the ecological system - from the macrosystem to the microsystem.

Education policy - this is soooo messed up. I could rant about national standards, race to the top, the reauthorization of ESEA, but will use some self-restraint. Instead, I would like to address University teaching. I teach undergraduates in early childhood education (birth to age 8) at a small public liberal arts university in Maine. I agree that education itself can be quite boring and non-motivating - in a large part because of authoritarian education policy (getting back to CA). Here is an example of what I think everyone is talking about from two experiences I have had this year. During fall semester there was a group of students in my introductory early childhood class who continually used their computers during class to social network. Drove me crazy, but in all honesty the students would not have been social networking had felt more connected to the class material - my fault. For the past two weeks, the students this semester have had their computers in class but working on an adult version of the Project Approach. The students are engaged, not much social networking if any, and will be presenting their culminating projects this next Friday. My role in their projects has almost been non-existent. In fact, I feel unnecessary as they have taken over their own learning. This is what education should look like.