Jay Lemke wrote:
>
> As with all education movements, contradictory interests pull in different
> directions ...
>
> In Australia I have seen some useful research come from government efforts
> to make literacy education curricula better reflect workplace literacy
> needs and practices ... the government's motives may have been to serve
> employers more than students, or students only as potential wage-earners
> and not in more humanistic/creative/subversive modes ... but the research
> began to show just what sorts of literacies are associated with what sorts
> of job-titles, salary levels, and required educational credentials. This
> potentially can show contradictions among these associations which might
> serve interests contrary to those that initiated the studies -- or at least
> funded the studies.
>
> I think that it _is_ important for us to know just what aspects of the
> curriculum actually do have any justification in terms of what people do
> outside of schools. I am as suspicious of academic-humanistic
> justifications for why we should all learn to read Shakespeare as I am of
> scientific-traditional ones for why we should all study the parts of the
> flower, as I am of vocationalist ones which justify multimedia literacy
> skills by their applications to reading blueprints and user manuals. In
> fact I think that one of the biggest intellectual scandals in the field of
> education and curriculum studies is that no one really bothers to find out
> empirically what knowledge is good for what outside of schools and the
> academy. Not just in commercial workplaces, but in scientific laboratories,
> government commissions, union organizing, child-rearing, television
> production, etc., etc. If the School to Work movement helps us find out,
> that would be a great contribution ... perhaps we might re-name it School
> to LIFE !
>
> My distrust of standardized curriculum runs deep. If there are things that
> everyone needs to know in order to successfully engage in a wide range of
> activities ... basic skills ... then one does not need a curriculum that
> decontextualizes these skills and teaches them -- you do much better to
> have them be taught as part of some total project with a richly
> contextualized agenda, motive, etc. And no matter what the detailed focus
> of such projects, those skills which really are of generic value will not
> be missed. Why should billions of people all learn the same things, unless
> those things are simply unavoidable? Why should there be commonality in
> people's educations beyond what the centripetal tendencies of community,
> subcultures, communication insure will happen regardless of the content
> focus of learning? What is wrong with a world in which each of us knows
> quite a number of very different things really well?
>
> Do we even know whether there are more people in the world or more
> projects/topics/special interests?
>
> I believe that communities are founded on interaction and interdependence,
> on the mutual articulation of individual and group and (multidimensional,
> fuzzy) category differences with one another that arises of necessity when
> we have to become linked to one another via material (including semiotic)
> culture. They are not founded on homogeneity, common perspectives, common
> beliefs, common values ... which by and large are constructed illusions,
> with more ideological than practical functions.
>
> Standardized Curricula seem by and large to try to enforce some dominant,
> hegemonic, and very narrow views of what is worth knowing on a vast and
> diverse humanity. Views that serve a correspondingly narrow range of
> _interests_, in both senses. These conformities are justified in a variety
> of ways, currently by the notion that what is taught is what is useful for
> life and work (instrumental rationality), less recently by the notion that
> what is taught is what makes us better human beings (humanistically,
> politically, morally, religiously ... in reverse historical order). My
> opinion of these pseudo-legitimations is not politely printable.
>
> Even at its narrowest, the world of work is far more diverse in terms of
> practices, ideas, viewpoints, and intellectual skills than is any
> curriculum now taught. This is the source of its promise for education.
>
> Regarding its dangers, the lesser one I think is that the world of work
> will exclude from the curriculum all the other worlds of life ... after
> all, those worlds manage to reproduce themselves and us quite well with
> little curricular help. A work-oriented curriculum could become narrow and
> unbalanced -- but then we have lived with academic curricula that certainly
> deserve that description for a long time now. Just what really lies outside
> the world of work that one could construct a useful curriculum for? matters
> which no one does professionally, from which no material profit or benefit
> can be extracted? such activities no doubt exist, but I can't think
> off-hand of any for which a standardized curriculum could usefully be
> designed... provided we include in the world of work, most broadly defined,
> various illegal and not-for-profit, but still work-a-day and professional
> activities (car theft, terrorist bombing, prostitution, cultural criticism,
> poetry-writing, political organizing, etc.)
>
> The greater one, already mentioned in the discussion here, is that
> work-oriented curricula will become a better means to fast-track the
> privileged towards under-accountable and overpaid occupations and shunt the
> oppressed into dead-end jobs of one sort or another ... dead-ended by
> death, imprisonment, or chronic ill-health; by lack of opportunity for
> material betterment or self-realization; by lack of empowerment to change
> these limiting conditions. This however would seem to be a common
> affordance of standardized curricula and schooling arrangements generally
> ... as witness all the curricula of modern history.
>
> Perhaps "no curricula at all" is not such a ridiculous idea. JAY.
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------