Keith Hudson wrote:
[snip]
> What concerns me -- and has concerned me ever since the beginning of FW
> list -- is that a significant minority of the population are educated so
> badly that it is incapable of responding to new employment possibilities
> and will remain trapped in criminality or public squalor or total
> dependency for the rest of their lives. It is getting worse by the day in
> all developed countries.
>
> It is not so much the closed minds of the educational boards and government
> funding bodies that you ran up against that is the problem. It is their
> very existence. There is no way that they can be reformed or their views
> changed because they consider it axiomatic (and also by you, presumably)
> that they are necessary. In truth, they have no real idea of what their
> customers feel because they are too removed from them and never receive
> direct feedback.
>
> Fortunately, and at long last, the situation has now become so serious in
> America and England (at least) that various educational experiments are now
> taking place (vouchers, charter schools, etc) by which funds are sent down
> to a level much closer to the customers -- parents and children. There is
> now some hope that we will start to see the beginnings of democratic
> education for the first time in 150 years ever since since nation-state
> governments (or, rather, their middle-class civil services) muscled
> themselves into the business.
[snip]
In abstracto, I should like vouchers, since they look like they
should rectify the perverse situation in capitalist
society whereby those who pay are the ones judged and not
the judges, despite the axiom of "consumer sovereignty". Students
and their parents pay; teachers and administrators
produce the product and get a wage.
Will vouchers result in teachers being tested *instead* of students?
Will vouchers bring about genuinely voluntary relations between
those who wish to learn and those from whom they think they
might wish to learn it? Will a few young persons hand Socrates
their vouchers in exchange for him conversing with them during
languid afternoons? (Of course not: Socrates was a pedophile and would
be incarcerated today to protect young persons from more than
just his "impiety"!)
"Nobody" in our society accepts that the paradigm of being-a-student,
like that of being-an-employee (etc.) is not suitable to citizens of
a democracy (the space of peer speech and action which perhaps
was invented in classical Greece, and in which there are neither
leaders nor followers, neither governors nor governed...).
I think vouchers will probably be used by "conservatives" (to be
distinguished from conservators, as I have previously noted!) to
subject their children and others' children to more "fundamentalist"
schooling than bureaucrats trained in hotbeds of
liberalism like Columbia University Teachers College would
ever consider subjecting young persons to. Vouchers will in
practice probably serve to help the right-wingers stop
neo-pinko followers of John Dewey from being able to
earn a living influencing the values of the next generation.
Vouchers are synergistic with
the other half of the conservatives' pedagogical siamese-twin:
"universal standardized tests". If young persons cannot
get anywhere in life without passing standardized tests, then it
is entirely irrelevant whether the young persons go to
school or are tutored or whatever, since all that will matter
is that they pass the standardized test, so any humanistic
cultural self-formation ("Bildung") can happen only
despite what is essential, just as even in present-day public and
private and parochial schools, some students find
genuinely inspiring experiences despite everything.
Which leads us to a real question: How can universal standardized
tests be compatible with *free enterprise* and *unfettered
free markets*?
The fact remains that George W Bush, like other privileged recent
American "leaders" (JFK et al.), attended schools even
though his parents were rich enough to give him a
real education (like Alexander the Great, e.g., received...).
I believe that if civilization advances in an honorific sense,
then the day will come when the idea of young persons being
"students" will seem just one step above their being slaves.
In the meantime, compulsory universal standardized
testing will assure that
vouchers do not cause mischief in the hands of
liberals who do not know what is good for themselves or for their
children and therefore need to be protected from
exercising their personal choices via the
discipline of the unfettered market.
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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