At 18:26 -0400 8/8/00, Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
>Most people seem not to have heard of what I call:
>"[Erving] Goffman's First Law":
>
> Wherever there is a system,
> there is a way to "work" it.
>
>There is a faint glimmer of hope in Max Weber's "iron cage"
>and in most other "institutions", "systems", etc.....
The following essay of Dave Stratman is illuminating. Stratman's writing appears on
http://www.newdemocracyworld.org, an interesting web site.
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YOU'LL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH:
SCHOOLING AND SOCIAL CONTROL
by Dave Stratman
(from New Democracy, Sept.-Oct. 1998)
A couple months ago these sample questions from the new MCAS (Massachusetts
Comprehensive Assessment System), given to all Massachusetts students in grades 4, 8,
and 10, appeared in the Boston Globe:
MUSIC: Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with a flute and drum. You
will find a piano under your seat. BIOLOGY: Create life. Estimate the difference in
subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier,
with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system.
Prove your thesis. HEALTH: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of
gauze, and a bottle of Scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has
been inspected. You have 15 minutes.
The "sample" was a parody, of course, but it made an important point: the test was
impossible. Students were subjected from 11 to 13 hours of tests in 17 days-longer
than the tests required for college, graduate school, and law school combined. Some
school systems, concerned that young people would not have the stamina to get them
through day after day of test-taking, supplied high-energy snacks and drinks to the
kids. Parents were encouraged to get their children to bed early. Teachers were told
not to assign homework during the weeks of testing.
These are "high-stakes" tests. When they are fully operational, students in grades 4
and 8 will need to pass the state tests to be promoted; students in grade 10 will have
to pass to be eligible to graduate. Teachers will be "held accountable" for their
students' grades. (Forty percent are expected to fail.) Schools in which students
perform poorly on the tests can be placed in receivership by the state and their
faculties dismissed.
The contents of the MCAS are secret: no educators in Massachusetts except certain
officials of the Department of Education and the Board of Education have been allowed
to examine the tests for their age-appropriateness or their relationship to what is
actually taught. The tests were devised by a company which had recently been fired by
the state of Kentucky for major errors in the design and marking of tests it had
administered there.
In literature circulated to parents and students before the tests, corporate backers
of "higher standards" boasted that "These are very, very tough tests-the toughest that
most Massachusetts students have ever taken" and that "good attendance and passing
grades" no longer entitle a student to a high school diploma. To prepare our students
"to compete with children from all over the world," said the corporations, much more
is required.
Tests similar to MCAS are being required of young people in state after state.
President Clinton is fighting for national assessments along the same lines.
What's behind this rush to testing and "higher standards?"
MAKING SCHOOLS "LEAN AND MEAN"
As is often the case, these developments inside the schools reflect events in the
wider society.
In the past two decades, corporations have adopted new management techniques designed
to undermine worker solidarity and integrate workers more thoroughly into the company
machine. Known variously as "continuous improvement" or "management by stress," or
"kaizen," the Japanese term for it, the technique consists essentially of dividing the
workforce into competing "teams" and "stressing" the production system by imposing
higher and higher production quotas. As workers work faster and faster to meet the
quotas, the company achieves several key goals: production is increased; jobs are
eliminated; "weak links" in the system break down and are replaced.
Most important, "continuous improvement" creates great anxiety in workers about their
ability to meet the ever-increasing goals, and encourages workers to replace
solidarity among themselves with loyalty to the Company Team. It forces workers into
constant speed-up. Workers are kept running so fast to meet company goals that they
don't have time to think or talk about their own goals or work together to pursue them.
Corporate-led education reforms use similar strategies. They use "School-Based
Management" to isolate teachers in each school from their colleagues around the
system. Teachers are then encouraged to join with management as a "team" to compete
for students and survival with other schools.
The reforms use testing to keep raising the standards which students and teachers must
meet, far beyond what their parents were expected to achieve and beyond anything that
would be of value. The purpose is the same as "continuous improvement" in a factory:
raise the anxiety level and keep students and teachers running so fast to meet the
goals set by the system that they have no time to think about their own goals for
education or for their lives.
These reforms will have terrible effects. Many students who would otherwise graduate
from high school will drop out. (In Texas and Florida, where "high-stakes" testing is
in place, high school drop-out rates which had been dropping have already begun to
rise.) Young people who fail to meet the new standards will be condemned to marginal
jobs and told to blame themselves.
The reforms redefine education as a process whereby young people constantly "remake"
and sell themselves to the corporations. The reforms attack the self-knowledge and
understanding of unsuccessful and successful students alike, as young people are
encouraged to redefine themselves-their own goals, their own thoughts and hopes and
desires-out of existence, to make themselves acceptable to our corporate masters.
Our children have qualities more important than those desired by corporate Human
Resource directors. Education conceived in this way makes economic productivity the
goal and measure of human of society and makes the corporations the judges of human
worth. It undermines the notion that human beings individually and collectively
possess goals which transcend capitalism.
CONFLICT OVER EDUCATIONAL GOALS
There is no more vital issue to understand in education than this: The corporate and
political elite who dominate education policy have goals for education which
contradict the goals of the people who populate the schools: teachers and students and
their families.
Public schools were supported by the industrial elite in America with the explicit
intention of strengthening elite control over the working population. In the middle of
the nineteenth century Horace Mann, the founder of the "common school," explained the
rationale for public schools: "...common schooling would discipline the common people
to the point where they would not threaten the sanctity of private property or
practice disobedience to their employer."* Public schools have been used ever since to
instill in young people a respectful attitude toward those in power. William Bennett,
while Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, explained, "The primordial
task of the schools is the transmission of social and political values." In a class
society, the values which the schools are designed to transmit are the values of the
dominant class-competition, inequality, the sanctity of private property, and the
belief that the good things in society trickle down from the!
!
elite.
At the heart of the education system, there is a conflict over its goals. On one side
stand educators and parents and students, most of whom share democratic values and
want to see students educated to the fullest of their ability. On the other side stand
the corporate and government elite, the masters of great wealth and power. Their goal
is that students be sorted out and persuaded to accept their lot in life, whether that
be the executive suite or the unemployment line, as fitting and just, and that social
inequality be legitimized and their hold on power reinforced.
This conflict over the goals of schooling is never acknowledged openly, yet it finds
its way into every debate over school funding and educational policy and practice, and
every debate over education reform.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SCHOOLS?
The corporate critique of the schools has served to cover up what's really wrong with
them: the schools promote inequality, competition, and unquestioning acceptance of the
social order.
The elite pursue these educational goals in many ways. Shortages in school funding
undermine the work of students and teachers and tell them that they are not valued.
School-business partnerships promote business values in the schools. Textbooks teach
that history is made by presidents and kings; ordinary people are dismissed as passive
victims or a dangerous problem.
But many of the means of achieving elite goals for education are far more subtle:
*The schools assume that there are big differences in people's intelligence and that
most people are not very smart, and are designed to "prove" these low expectations.
Teachers are trained to find supposed differences in children's abilities;
standardized, "norm-referenced" tests are designed to sort kids out and produce a
range of test scores which match the social hierarchy-in other words, which show that
richer people are smarter. Shortages of teachers and textbooks, lack of support for
their work, and countless other devices are means by which students and teachers are
set up to fail.
*The schools use competition and ranking to legitimize the social hierarchy. Students
reluctant to compete for approval get low marks: what is really a conflict over values
is seen as a failure of students' intelligence. For teachers, school life consists
more often of an isolated struggle to survive than being encouraged to join with other
teachers to nurture students.
*Course content often has no value except as a measure of students' willingness to
master it. Much of the content consists of "facts" torn out of their social context,
with all the life sucked out of them, because their life is rooted in the class war
the elite seek to obscure.
These and other means are used by schools to prepare most students for working lives
spent performing boring tasks with unquestioning obedience in a "democracy" in which
the goals of society are not up for discussion and in which the idea of people acting
collectively for their own goals is considered subversive.
WHAT'S RIGHT WITH THE SCHOOLS?
Teachers and students and their families share goals which contradict the goals of the
elite, and they work to achieve these goals in every way they know how in spite of
elite domination. The gigantic effort by corporate and political leaders to impose
education reform is necessary precisely because the people in the schools have worked
for their goals with enough success to threaten elite control.
When teachers stimulate and challenge; when they encourage all their students to learn
and inspire them to think about the world as it really is; when they create a
nurturing environment; when they fight for smaller class sizes; when they offer each
other words of support: when they do any number of things they do every day, they are
opposing elite goals for education and working for the shared goals of ordinary people.
When students help each other, or raise critical questions, or refuse to join in the
race for grades and approval; when they exercise their curiosity and intelligence;
even when they hang on the phone for hours, talking about "life," they are resisting
elite goals and working for a better concept of life.
When parents listen sympathetically to their children, or talk with their friends or
each other about the school or raising kids: when people do these things that they do
every day, they are resisting elite goals and working for the opposite values of
solidarity and equality and democracy.
To the extent that students succeed in real learning and teachers in teaching and
parents in raising their children to be thoughtful and considerate, they succeed in
spite of the education system, not because of it.
The remarkable thing about the public schools isn't that some teachers become
demoralized and "burned out," or that some students drop out or do poorly, but that so
many teachers and students achieve so much in the face of a system designed to fail.
EDUCATION AND REVOLUTION
Capitalist society is based on slavery: the enslavement of workers to the wage system
and the enslavement of human beings to things. Education worthy of the name must help
set us free, not further bind us in chains. The conflict over the goals of education
is part of the class war over the goals of society. Only a movement which challenges
the goals and values and power of the elite can change education.
There are a thousand questions about society which elite institutions will never raise
but which are critical to our future. The revolutionary movement must consider anew
the goals of human society and the measures of human achievement. It must re-examine
our relationship to technology and to Nature. It must enable people to transform work
and play into sources of creativity and fulfillment.
We do not have the power at this point to change education, but we can begin to pose
these questions. The most liberating and humanly fulfilling education for all of us
will come as we take part in the struggle to overthrow elite rule and recreate human
society.
*Thanks to Bill Griffen for the H. Mann quote.
--
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Tom Lowe Judge a moth
Jackson, Mississippi by the beauty of its candle
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -Rumi
http://www.jacksonprogressive.com
