Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Hi Harry, We have to differ in our understanding of what is happening in education. Ideological responses to our reading of the world always influence education. "A Nation AT Risk", "No Child Left Behind", the personae of Bill Bennett and Rod Paige, and others, are part of a conservative reading of what's wrong in education. Indeed, your embrace of phonics and your implicit criticism of whole language learning is part of the conservative critique of schooling. Your criticism of educational bureacracy is a valid one, one on which you would get agreement on both the left and right, along with my own agreement. There are a number of studies that would support you in the perspective that schools often construct experiences and create rules and regulations that benefit, primarily, the adults who run them, rather than the young who come there to learn. This is a problem, but it only means that we need to have a conversation in our communities about the way we educate our young for the future. And I do not mean striking a stacked committee with all of the usual suspects in the local education foodchain. Although they use the rhetoric of 'thinking outside the box', many of these folks are not capable of doing so because of their groupthink blinders. Schools have never been very democratic places, and they are less so today. Don't get fooled by the keywords that educational mangagers often use in public forums. Let's not forget that schools are also a place of work, for both adults and students and need to be put under the microscope of 'futurework'. I will share a brief anecdote from an interview I have been transcribing. I was talking to a teacher about his perception of funding inequities around support for high stakes testing. He observed that the testocrats of the school board's test bureaucracy were being lavishly overfunded (expensive lunches and office furniture which sat dormant for months, rather than being used) when his text book budget was frozen and his students were being forced to share texts. Needless to say, it created havoc in his classroom management of homework assignments. The Weberian perspective that this is a characteristic of bureacracy is valid, but I think we have to push our analysis a little deeper to get at the root problems. There are social linkages and networks here which are often very revealing of what's really going on. Have a good holiday, Harry! Best, Bob - Original Message - From: Harry Pollard To: 'Robert E. Bowd' ; 'Keith Hudson' Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 2:37 AM Subject: RE: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Bob, Good article. However, this isn’t a “conservative” problem. The look-say nonsense wasn’t right-wing. The 8th grade LA kids are doing better than the 10th graders. This is because the 8th are back to phonetics. Yet a generation of kids failed to learn to read because of a silly idea. The problem is always the same. A public body grows and grows and it’s primary objective changes to maintaining itself. This is true of all educational bodies up to the highest in the land. Fudging results is part of the operation. Actually teaching kids is way down the list. It’s sad. Harry Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net From: Robert E. Bowd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 2:30 PMTo: Harry Pollard; 'Keith Hudson'Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Hi Harry, I think the letter, below, about sums up the current state of education during the conservative restoration in America. Canada is still relatively better, but there are governance, funding, and curriculum problems, including attempts to imitate what is happening in America, and the inadequate provision of educational support to our large immigrant population. I personally don't believe the evaluative state (standards and high stakes testing created by test experts, education technocrats, and their minority allies in the community) works. Education needs to be cut free from the corporate agenda of the Business Roundtable and the Business Council On National Issues. The normalisation of curricular forms based on the way the private sector conducts business (!) needs to be a
Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Ideas that limit are always silly ideas. REH - Original Message - From: Harry Pollard To: 'Robert E. Bowd' ; 'Keith Hudson' Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, December 19, 2003 2:37 AM Subject: RE: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Bob, Good article. However, this isn’t a “conservative” problem. The look-say nonsense wasn’t right-wing. The 8th grade LA kids are doing better than the 10th graders. This is because the 8th are back to phonetics. Yet a generation of kids failed to learn to read because of a silly idea. The problem is always the same. A public body grows and grows and it’s primary objective changes to maintaining itself. This is true of all educational bodies up to the highest in the land. Fudging results is part of the operation. Actually teaching kids is way down the list. It’s sad. Harry Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net From: Robert E. Bowd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 2:30 PMTo: Harry Pollard; 'Keith Hudson'Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Hi Harry, I think the letter, below, about sums up the current state of education during the conservative restoration in America. Canada is still relatively better, but there are governance, funding, and curriculum problems, including attempts to imitate what is happening in America, and the inadequate provision of educational support to our large immigrant population. I personally don't believe the evaluative state (standards and high stakes testing created by test experts, education technocrats, and their minority allies in the community) works. Education needs to be cut free from the corporate agenda of the Business Roundtable and the Business Council On National Issues. The normalisation of curricular forms based on the way the private sector conducts business (!) needs to be abandoned. A lot more thought needs to be given to how the growth and development of children, in schools, relates to the kinds of communities we want. Currently, I do not believe the schools are creating the kind of subjectivities able to face the kind of future we are facing as a society. Critical thinking is more often taught as a technical skill to be placed in an organizational tool kit for coping with the information society, rather than as a complex, contradictory, creative, tension-ridden, open-ended skill that blends historical memory, ethics, imagination, intuition, cultural common sense, and reason. And so on. Good to talk to you, Harry. BB From today's Prince Georges County Journal -- by a PG County Elementary School Teacher ...Truth left behind Dec 11 Journal The current reality of public education in the United States is based on fiction. The reasons behind the so-called ``No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) act have turned out to be a lie. We have been had. The real victims are the young people in our country because they will receive an inferior public education under the current law. The lies behind the NCLB were brought to us by the political leadership in Washington. The current secretary of education, Roderick R. Paige, was superintendent of the Houston, Texas, school district before coming to Washington. The Bush administration fashioned the NCLB based on the concepts of accountability and high-stakes testing which Paige championed in Houston. We were assured that those concepts led to the ``education miracle" achieved in Houston. The miracle consisted of a disappearing high school dropout rate, greatly rising scores on the statewide test and a narrowing of the achievement gap between white and minority students. The information from Houston was so good that even Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy were convinced of its validity and gave their support for passage of the NCLB. Now comes the bad news: The low dropout rate in Houston is mythical and the rising scores on the Texas state test were manipulated. It is a wonder the Republic is still standing. In the last two months, we have learned the sad facts about Houston, thanks to certain individuals in that education community. Local television station KHOU reported a dropout fiasco at Houston
RE: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Bob, Good article. However, this isn’t a “conservative” problem. The look-say nonsense wasn’t right-wing. The 8th grade LA kids are doing better than the 10th graders. This is because the 8th are back to phonetics. Yet a generation of kids failed to learn to read because of a silly idea. The problem is always the same. A public body grows and grows and it’s primary objective changes to maintaining itself. This is true of all educational bodies up to the highest in the land. Fudging results is part of the operation. Actually teaching kids is way down the list. It’s sad. Harry Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net From: Robert E. Bowd [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 2:30 PM To: Harry Pollard; 'Keith Hudson' Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Hi Harry, I think the letter, below, about sums up the current state of education during the conservative restoration in America. Canada is still relatively better, but there are governance, funding, and curriculum problems, including attempts to imitate what is happening in America, and the inadequate provision of educational support to our large immigrant population. I personally don't believe the evaluative state (standards and high stakes testing created by test experts, education technocrats, and their minority allies in the community) works. Education needs to be cut free from the corporate agenda of the Business Roundtable and the Business Council On National Issues. The normalisation of curricular forms based on the way the private sector conducts business (!) needs to be abandoned. A lot more thought needs to be given to how the growth and development of children, in schools, relates to the kinds of communities we want. Currently, I do not believe the schools are creating the kind of subjectivities able to face the kind of future we are facing as a society. Critical thinking is more often taught as a technical skill to be placed in an organizational tool kit for coping with the information society, rather than as a complex, contradictory, creative, tension-ridden, open-ended skill that blends historical memory, ethics, imagination, intuition, cultural common sense, and reason. And so on. Good to talk to you, Harry. BB From today's Prince Georges County Journal -- by a PG County Elementary School Teacher ... Truth left behind Dec 11 Journal The current reality of public education in the United States is based on fiction. The reasons behind the so-called ``No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) act have turned out to be a lie. We have been had. The real victims are the young people in our country because they will receive an inferior public education under the current law. The lies behind the NCLB were brought to us by the political leadership in Washington. The current secretary of education, Roderick R. Paige, was superintendent of the Houston, Texas, school district before coming to Washington. The Bush administration fashioned the NCLB based on the concepts of accountability and high-stakes testing which Paige championed in Houston. We were assured that those concepts led to the ``education miracle" achieved in Houston. The miracle consisted of a disappearing high school dropout rate, greatly rising scores on the statewide test and a narrowing of the achievement gap between white and minority students. The information from Houston was so good that even Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy were convinced of its validity and gave their support for passage of the NCLB. Now comes the bad news: The low dropout rate in Houston is mythical and the rising scores on the Texas state test were manipulated. It is a wonder the Republic is still standing. In the last two months, we have learned the sad facts about Houston, thanks to certain individuals in that education community. Local television station KHOU reported a dropout fiasco at Houston's Sharpstown High School. By changing the codes of students who dropped out, the school made it appear that very few students didn't finish high school. State auditors found similar stories at 14 other Houston high schools. Austin also had unusually low dropout rates. School officials concede that the reported dropout rates were worthless and are no longer using them in accountability studies. During Rod Paige's tenure as superintendent in Houston, some amazing academic progress took place. In 1995, his first year in Austin, only 26 percent of tenth graders in Austin High Scho
RE: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Title: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Tom, You seem to be pretty good to me. Harry Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Lunde Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 11:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Thomas: Well, I've come out a working class envirnoment as well and I haven't accomplished shit. Maybe I didn't have the luck! Maybe I was deficient in some character trait! Maybe, I made a wrong choice or several? Who knows and who cares? I don't parade my wherewithals for I have none. Would I wish that it was different? Only economically as for most of my years I have earned below average which leaves me constantly scrabbling for "need" money. Forget disposable income in my life - one or your lunches would cover my monthly quota. Am I whining - yeah, a little bit. Am I fairly happy, I would answer yes. Thank god for the Internet, I was getting tired of theorizing to myself and books don't talk back. Love ya all. -- --- Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.552 / Virus Database: 344 - Release Date: 12/15/2003 --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.552 / Virus Database: 344 - Release Date: 12/15/2003
Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Hi Harry, I think the letter, below, about sums up the current state of education during the conservative restoration in America. Canada is still relatively better, but there are governance, funding, and curriculum problems, including attempts to imitate what is happening in America, and the inadequate provision of educational support to our large immigrant population. I personally don't believe the evaluative state (standards and high stakes testing created by test experts, education technocrats, and their minority allies in the community) works. Education needs to be cut free from the corporate agenda of the Business Roundtable and the Business Council On National Issues. The normalisation of curricular forms based on the way the private sector conducts business (!) needs to be abandoned. A lot more thought needs to be given to how the growth and development of children, in schools, relates to the kinds of communities we want. Currently, I do not believe the schools are creating the kind of subjectivities able to face the kind of future we are facing as a society. Critical thinking is more often taught as a technical skill to be placed in an organizational tool kit for coping with the information society, rather than as a complex, contradictory, creative, tension-ridden, open-ended skill that blends historical memory, ethics, imagination, intuition, cultural common sense, and reason. And so on. Good to talk to you, Harry. BB From today's Prince Georges County Journal -- by a PG County Elementary School Teacher ...Truth left behind Dec 11 Journal The current reality of public education in the United States is based on fiction. The reasons behind the so-called ``No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) act have turned out to be a lie. We have been had. The real victims are the young people in our country because they will receive an inferior public education under the current law. The lies behind the NCLB were brought to us by the political leadership in Washington. The current secretary of education, Roderick R. Paige, was superintendent of the Houston, Texas, school district before coming to Washington. The Bush administration fashioned the NCLB based on the concepts of accountability and high-stakes testing which Paige championed in Houston. We were assured that those concepts led to the ``education miracle" achieved in Houston. The miracle consisted of a disappearing high school dropout rate, greatly rising scores on the statewide test and a narrowing of the achievement gap between white and minority students. The information from Houston was so good that even Democrats like Sen. Edward Kennedy were convinced of its validity and gave their support for passage of the NCLB. Now comes the bad news: The low dropout rate in Houston is mythical and the rising scores on the Texas state test were manipulated. It is a wonder the Republic is still standing. In the last two months, we have learned the sad facts about Houston, thanks to certain individuals in that education community. Local television station KHOU reported a dropout fiasco at Houston's Sharpstown High School. By changing the codes of students who dropped out, the school made it appear that very few students didn't finish high school. State auditors found similar stories at 14 other Houston high schools. Austin also had unusually low dropout rates. School officials concede that the reported dropout rates were worthless and are no longer using them in accountability studies. During Rod Paige's tenure as superintendent in Houston, some amazing academic progress took place. In 1995, his first year in Austin, only 26 percent of tenth graders in Austin High School passed the Texas math test. By the 2000-01 school year, 99 percent of tenth graders passed the test. According to a common practice, administrators are allowed to hold back weak students in the ninth grade for one or two years, then skip them on to the eleventh grade, effectively excluding them from taking the tenth grade test. According to some educators in Houston, this is commonly done, and it explains the spectacular rise in test scores under Paige's leadership. The New York Times also examined the performance of Houston students and reported the results on December 3, 2003. The newspaper report compared scores on a national exam that Houston students took alongside the Texas state exam. The results show that Houston students stagnated in the same place or lost ground compared to their counterparts across the nation. A great big gap exists between the national test results and the Texas state results. Remember, the success of Houston's schools was used as a backdrop and justification for the creation of the NCLB with its heavy emphasis on accountability. Prince George's County is closely engaged in this debate. Our new CEO, Andre J. Hornsby, is a close
RE: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Bloods” with my friends. We were all poor so we would swap a lot. “Tuppenny Bloods were “blood and thunder” publications for kids. They were full of war stories, adventure stories, space stories, school stories, and they were called Adventure, Wizard, Champion, Hotspur, and suchlike. We avidly read about such heroes as the “Wolf of Kabul” a turbaned English adventurer with his Indian buddy whose name I can’t remember. I do remember Click-a-Bar his weapon. It was a cricket bat bound with brass wire which made it a mighty weapon. With it he would crack heads with abandon. Unbelievably politically incorrect stuff, but it didn’t seem to do us any harm. Almost no drawings in them – just pages and pages of text. In 1973, we made our first return trip to England. In Victoria station was a W. H. Smith piled high with newspapers and books – including a selection of “Tuppenny Bloods”. I picked them up and found – comics. The only text were captions – and simple ones at that. What does that say about modern English education? I want neither public, nor private education – I want the best education. To get it, we need competition in education. I want parents to be able to choose better schools over poorer schools for their kids. There is probably no other way to raise standards – which are low. In the free market competition raises quality and lowers costs. It should be allowed to do the same for education. Unless you have a better idea. Harry Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert E. Bowd Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 12:31 PM To: Harry Pollard; Keith Hudson Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Hi Keith and Harry, With the utmost respect for the both of you, I submit the following. I consider my working class roots to be as impeccable as yours. Like you, I share a strong work ethic, an innate survival instinct, and a passion for a society better than the one into which I was born. My father came to Canada as child labour, as a Barnardo home boy, from England. Until he was 16 he was effectively free farm labour, separated from his biological family in Cambridgeshire, and marginalized by the Canadian family whom he served. He suffered emotional and physical abuse, was not allowed to eat with them, and was denied an education beyond the second grade. Shame characterized his life as he wandered the back streets, away from a public gaze, and tended the gardens of the rich, in my hometown. My mother was crippled by polio, from the time she was 4 years old. She had many side illnesses in pre-Medicare Canada. I was raised in poverty and knew about hunger and class marginalization as a child and bear that psychological imprint as an adult. The social capital of the Welfare State, after World War 11, and the ideology of equal opportunity, allowed me to get an education. It was the luck of context, however, not any special merit on my part. I suspect it is similar with the two of you, respectively. In a family of five, I am the only one who finished high school and went on to university education. There are many, many bright working class youth as capable as I am, and as you are. However, current educational reforms are limiting the kinds of opportunities we were able to partake of. I became a teacher and went many, many rounds, with a class stratified school system, on behalf of my working class students. As an educational researcher, my only interest has been in what happens to working class children in essentially middle class schools. My current project, "Whose Standards?: Performance Standards, Globalization, and the Restructuring of School Knowledge" is part of my attempt to understand what is happening to working class kids under the current school reforms in relation to the paradigm shift in the way kid's achievment and teacher accountability is benchmarked using high stakes testing. The project has been supported by SSHRC funding and several scholarships. I have had lots of contact with powerful and wealthy people. I have been a political activist and president of the riding association of a former Ontario Finance Minister. But who cares? I don't think it has anything to do with what I contribute to this list. Rightly, or wrongly, I see this list as a place for me to learn from some very smart people, exchange views, and get information, a lot of which I keep for use in my work. My view is that the working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal
Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Keith, Of course, I don't "owe" you, or anyone else, respect. It is a gift I freely give to others who demonstrate personal integrity, regardless of whether I personally agree with them, or not - and this is a list where that gift can be generously given. I have been known to be deferential, without being respectful. Working class people are usually pretty good at hiding their class anger, with it usually taking various forms of self-destructiveness when it is a problem. Most of the time it is just passive silence, hiding the kind of passionate, uncredentialled self-learning (not recognized in the economy) which Thomas talks about in his eloquent post. Thank you, Thomas, for your honesty. BB - Original Message - From: Keith Hudson To: Robert E. Bowd Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; Harry Pollard Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 1:16 AM Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Hi Bob,At 15:31 15/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:<<<<No personal disrespect is intended towards either you, Keith, or Harry, and I will state unequivocally my respect for you both. If I have written anything that has offended you, I offer my most deepfelt apologies for doing so.>>>>>Good gracious! No possible offence taken. You don't owe us any respect -- at least not me. Anybody who can write as you have done in your posting (which is in full below) deserves respect in turn.Yes, you are quite right. You didn't say so, but I was being over-dramatic. The fact that Harry and I are working class has nothing to do with it. It was a non sequitur argument on my part!But the fact remains that, in England at least, the state school system is failing badly. As you write here:<<<<My view is that the working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal reforms, despite the rhetoric of equity. Failure rates and drop out rates are increasing. The savage inequalities that have injured the working class and minorities still exist.>>>>There are many contributing factors to all this. It is not just the state education system. The wider social and cultural context is at fault, too. I feel, however, that the civil service must take most of the blame (at least in England) because they (that is, the Department of Education) have allowed the standard of state school teachers to decline so badly and so steadily over the years. Half of newly-'qualified' teachers cannot do simple mathematics. Many of them are actually afraid of the subject. Many (if not most) of those teachers in secondary schools who are trying teach physics (to A-level -- pre-university level) have never learned the subject themselves! Many newly-qualified teachers cannot write a decent sentence. Our FW colleague, Christoph Creuss, with whom I disagree very greatly on several economics issues, who has learned English as a Swiss (in a Swiss state school as he reminds us!), can write English better than most English people -- more than 80% of them, I suggest, and equal to most of the remainder. Not only are his sentences constructed properly but each follows the other in a logical straightforward way that doesn't cause me to re-read each paragraph twice or thrice over to try and understand just what the writer is driving at.I saw a fascinating and very moving Channel 4 programme last night on feral children which is very apposite to what we are discussing and I am hoping to write a little about this in a separate posting. It very much has to do with brain development in the earliest months and years of the child (for which the teachers and the education authorities are not directly to blame) -- and this is the direction from which I approach educational matters.I was bitten by the Skinnerian bug when I was a young man. In fact, I became so interested in Skinner's researches that I left chemistry for a couple of years and became the first professional writer of learning programmes in England. But that experience -- and the subsequent failure of programmed learning (except for the very highly motivated) -- taught me that one should not be carried away by ideologies, especially in education, and this has caused me to become very suspicious of the succession of theories that we have seen in the educationalists' world in the last 30 years. It has only been the advent of basic science in the subject in only the last 10 years or so -- mainly from the various neurosciences -- which is now bringing some order and sense to the proceedings.The neurosciences are also, at last, beginning to marry the respective contributions of environment and genetics in the overall scheme of things. So I will
Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Title: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Thomas: Well, I've come out a working class envirnoment as well and I haven't accomplished shit. Maybe I didn't have the luck! Maybe I was deficient in some character trait! Maybe, I made a wrong choice or several? Who knows and who cares? I don't parade my wherewithals for I have none. Would I wish that it was different? Only economically as for most of my years I have earned below average which leaves me constantly scrabbling for "need" money. Forget disposable income in my life - one or your lunches would cover my monthly quota. Am I whining - yeah, a little bit. Am I fairly happy, I would answer yes. Thank god for the Internet, I was getting tired of theorizing to myself and books don't talk back. Love ya all. -- From: "Robert E. Bowd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Harry Pollard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade Date: Mon, Dec 15, 2003, 3:31 PM Hi Keith and Harry, With the utmost respect for the both of you, I submit the following. I consider my working class roots to be as impeccable as yours. Like you, I share a strong work ethic, an innate survival instinct, and a passion for a society better than the one into which I was born. My father came to Canada as child labour, as a Barnardo home boy, from England. Until he was 16 he was effectively free farm labour, separated from his biological family in Cambridgeshire, and marginalized by the Canadian family whom he served. He suffered emotional and physical abuse, was not allowed to eat with them, and was denied an education beyond the second grade. Shame characterized his life as he wandered the back streets, away from a public gaze, and tended the gardens of the rich, in my hometown. My mother was crippled by polio, from the time she was 4 years old. She had many side illnesses in pre-Medicare Canada. I was raised in poverty and knew about hunger and class marginalization as a child and bear that psychological imprint as an adult. The social capital of the Welfare State, after World War 11, and the ideology of equal opportunity, allowed me to get an education. It was the luck of context, however, not any special merit on my part. I suspect it is similar with the two of you, respectively. In a family of five, I am the only one who finished high school and went on to university education. There are many, many bright working class youth as capable as I am, and as you are. However, current educational reforms are limiting the kinds of opportunities we were able to partake of. I became a teacher and went many, many rounds, with a class stratified school system, on behalf of my working class students. As an educational researcher, my only interest has been in what happens to working class children in essentially middle class schools. My current project, "Whose Standards?: Performance Standards, Globalization, and the Restructuring of School Knowledge" is part of my attempt to understand what is happening to working class kids under the current school reforms in relation to the paradigm shift in the way kid's achievment and teacher accountability is benchmarked using high stakes testing. The project has been supported by SSHRC funding and several scholarships. I have had lots of contact with powerful and wealthy people. I have been a political activist and president of the riding association of a former Ontario Finance Minister. But who cares? I don't think it has anything to do with what I contribute to this list. Rightly, or wrongly, I see this list as a place for me to learn from some very smart people, exchange views, and get information, a lot of which I keep for use in my work. My view is that the working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal reforms, despite the rhetoric of equity. Failure rates and drop out rates are increasing. The savage inequalities that have injured the working class and minorities still exist. I can assure you that to imply that there is a correlation between being working class and supporting private education is absolutely spurious. I worked for several years on large scale surveys of public attitudes towards education in Ontario and we found no evidence that working class respondents, in significant numbers, were supportive of this kind of change. In fact, most working class activists see private education as a threat to working class opportunity. Studies of working class resistance indicate that some working class youth internalize the meritocratic myths of middle class schooling and thrive within them. Paul Willis's classic study of working class
Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Hi Bob, At 15:31 15/12/2003 -0500, you wrote: No personal disrespect is intended towards either you, Keith, or Harry, and I will state unequivocally my respect for you both. If I have written anything that has offended you, I offer my most deepfelt apologies for doing so. > Good gracious! No possible offence taken. You don't owe us any respect -- at least not me. Anybody who can write as you have done in your posting (which is in full below) deserves respect in turn. Yes, you are quite right. You didn't say so, but I was being over-dramatic. The fact that Harry and I are working class has nothing to do with it. It was a non sequitur argument on my part! But the fact remains that, in England at least, the state school system is failing badly. As you write here: My view is that the working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal reforms, despite the rhetoric of equity. Failure rates and drop out rates are increasing. The savage inequalities that have injured the working class and minorities still exist. There are many contributing factors to all this. It is not just the state education system. The wider social and cultural context is at fault, too. I feel, however, that the civil service must take most of the blame (at least in England) because they (that is, the Department of Education) have allowed the standard of state school teachers to decline so badly and so steadily over the years. Half of newly-'qualified' teachers cannot do simple mathematics. Many of them are actually afraid of the subject. Many (if not most) of those teachers in secondary schools who are trying teach physics (to A-level -- pre-university level) have never learned the subject themselves! Many newly-qualified teachers cannot write a decent sentence. Our FW colleague, Christoph Creuss, with whom I disagree very greatly on several economics issues, who has learned English as a Swiss (in a Swiss state school as he reminds us!), can write English better than most English people -- more than 80% of them, I suggest, and equal to most of the remainder. Not only are his sentences constructed properly but each follows the other in a logical straightforward way that doesn't cause me to re-read each paragraph twice or thrice over to try and understand just what the writer is driving at. I saw a fascinating and very moving Channel 4 programme last night on feral children which is very apposite to what we are discussing and I am hoping to write a little about this in a separate posting. It very much has to do with brain development in the earliest months and years of the child (for which the teachers and the education authorities are not directly to blame) -- and this is the direction from which I approach educational matters. I was bitten by the Skinnerian bug when I was a young man. In fact, I became so interested in Skinner's researches that I left chemistry for a couple of years and became the first professional writer of learning programmes in England. But that experience -- and the subsequent failure of programmed learning (except for the very highly motivated) -- taught me that one should not be carried away by ideologies, especially in education, and this has caused me to become very suspicious of the succession of theories that we have seen in the educationalists' world in the last 30 years. It has only been the advent of basic science in the subject in only the last 10 years or so -- mainly from the various neurosciences -- which is now bringing some order and sense to the proceedings. The neurosciences are also, at last, beginning to marry the respective contributions of environment and genetics in the overall scheme of things. So I will end here with the uncomfortable thought that the 80-odd brain genes that we possess and which the chimp doesn't, and the various (almost infinite) semi-random combinations they make at the point of fertilisation also contribute to the matter. (This is not to mention the 1,000 plus genes that we share with chimps and which are also involved in brain development in the foetus.) And, in an age where technology and an understanding of science is becoming basic to our civilisation, this genetic matter, too, is important and may be contributing to divisiveness. Keith At 15:31 15/12/2003 -0500, you wrote: Hi Keith and Harry, With the utmost respect for the both of you, I submit the following. I consider my working class roots to be as impeccable as yours. Like you, I share a strong work ethic, an innate survival instinct, and a passion for a society better than the one into which I was born. My father came to Canada as child labour, as a Barnardo home boy, from England. Until he was 16 he was effectively free farm labour, separated from his biological family in Cambridgeshire, and marginalized by the Canadian family whom he served. He suffered emotional and physical abuse, was not allowed to eat with them, and was denied an education beyond the second
Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Hi Keith and Harry, With the utmost respect for the both of you, I submit the following. I consider my working class roots to be as impeccable as yours. Like you, I share a strong work ethic, an innate survival instinct, and a passion for a society better than the one into which I was born. My father came to Canada as child labour, as a Barnardo home boy, from England. Until he was 16 he was effectively free farm labour, separated from his biological family in Cambridgeshire, and marginalized by the Canadian family whom he served. He suffered emotional and physical abuse, was not allowed to eat with them, and was denied an education beyond the second grade. Shame characterized his life as he wandered the back streets, away from a public gaze, and tended the gardens of the rich, in my hometown. My mother was crippled by polio, from the time she was 4 years old. She had many side illnesses in pre-Medicare Canada. I was raised in poverty and knew about hunger and class marginalization as a child and bear that psychological imprint as an adult. The social capital of the Welfare State, after World War 11, and the ideology of equal opportunity, allowed me to get an education. It was the luck of context, however, not any special merit on my part. I suspect it is similar with the two of you, respectively. In a family of five, I am the only one who finished high school and went on to university education. There are many, many bright working class youth as capable as I am, and as you are. However, current educational reforms are limiting the kinds of opportunities we were able to partake of. I became a teacher and went many, many rounds, with a class stratified school system, on behalf of my working class students. As an educational researcher, my only interest has been in what happens to working class children in essentially middle class schools. My current project, "Whose Standards?: Performance Standards, Globalization, and the Restructuring of School Knowledge" is part of my attempt to understand what is happening to working class kids under the current school reforms in relation to the paradigm shift in the way kid's achievment and teacher accountability is benchmarked using high stakes testing. The project has been supported by SSHRC funding and several scholarships. I have had lots of contact with powerful and wealthy people. I have been a political activist and president of the riding association of a former Ontario Finance Minister. But who cares? I don't think it has anything to do with what I contribute to this list. Rightly, or wrongly, I see this list as a place for me to learn from some very smart people, exchange views, and get information, a lot of which I keep for use in my work. My view is that the working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal reforms, despite the rhetoric of equity. Failure rates and drop out rates are increasing. The savage inequalities that have injured the working class and minorities still exist. I can assure you that to imply that there is a correlation between being working class and supporting private education is absolutely spurious. I worked for several years on large scale surveys of public attitudes towards education in Ontario and we found no evidence that working class respondents, in significant numbers, were supportive of this kind of change. In fact, most working class activists see private education as a threat to working class opportunity. Studies of working class resistance indicate that some working class youth internalize the meritocratic myths of middle class schooling and thrive within them. Paul Willis's classic study of working class resistance called such kids "ear'oles." But many resist the class cultural agenda, that often includes the belittlement of working class work and working class identities and engage in cultural resistance. You and Harry may well be examples of the former, but I am an example of the latter. High school was a cultural dead space, for me. You support private education. I differ and support public education. Vouchers and charter schools do not help working class kids. The research is pretty clear that the best predictor of success, in schooling, is the neighborhood you live in. Taking only the matter of reading scores, the higher your parent's socio-economic status, the higher your reading level. High stakes testing is producing similar correlations. No personal disrespect is intended towards either you, Keith, or Harry, and I will state unequivocally my respect for you both. If I have written anything that has offended you, I offer my most deepfelt apologies for doing so. Respectfully submitted, Bob Keith wrote: It is strange, is it not, that you and I, both working class, and who know what it's all about at every level of society from top to bottom, should be the ones (the on
