ABSTRACT
To make classrooms safe places in which to take intellectual risks and engage in ethical inquiry, it seems important to know more about how children construe the institutional goals associated with schooling and whether children accept those goals as fair. Toward this end, I have conducted a series of interview studies on children’s conceptions and theories of fair and effective ways to conduct the business of schooling. Here, knowledge of children’s critiques of the testing process will be used to justify the need for discussions among students and teachers about the purposes behind various classroom practices. Such discussions could serve to help students and teachers create communities of scholars wherein conflicts arise over content-related issues such as whether an argument is logical or a position is ethical rather than over power-related issues such as whose educational goals are most important.
