For example, I had heard of the ills of Tylerism in curriculum & teaching
for a number of years before I finally got around to reading the original
_Basic Principles_ and can still recall my surprize. The underlying metaphor
was certainly rationalist but there were, and still are, a paucity of
methods for goal setting that succeed in evading that particular critique
(assuming it can indeed be evaded). There were also a number of caveats
expressed in the text which for the most part were quite sensible. The
problem seemed to arise mostly from the way the model became linked into
other rationalized (and frequently antagonistic) institutional practices and
control structures as well as the ways it became "compacted" such that all
the caveats were squeezed out. The metaphor certainly permitted this
reduction and the garden escapee became a pernicious weed.
I think this is one of the reasons I take Latour's quasi-animism seriously.
Models/ideas become materially embodied and linked within the system(s) in
which they become located. Once there, they are not inert but present
organizing foci; they can, to continue the analogy, take root. A system can
become leveraged by them more surely than by any crowbar but they are not
merely tools in the hands of actors--they themselves have motivational force
if only by virtue of the many hands that tug upon them and can no longer let
go. Even those who resist come to define the problem of escape in their terms.
Rolfe
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Rolfe Windward (UCLA GSE&IS, Curriculum & Teaching)
rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu (text/BinHex/MIME/Uuencode)
CompuServe: 70014,0646 (text/binary/GIF/JPEG)
"To perceive means to immobilize ...we seize, in the act of perception,
something that outruns the act of perception itself." -Henri Bergson