Nevertheless, I don't think we can allow ourselves the luxury of taking an
either-or position on individual vs. social views of education.
It _is_ possible for those with sufficient wherewithal to enjoy a wider
range of quite real choices about the education of their children. (Of
course I'd rather see what the students themselves would choose, given
access to the needed resources.) Whether financial capital allows you to
choose among private schools, many of which give a very good quality of
education, some even rather more progressive than the average public school
... or cultural capital allows you to choose home-schooling ... such
choices are far more real and available for some than for others.
I argued in an earlier posting that a lot of the for-profit Tweedledumbing
that we may want to defend public education's Tweedledecency from
represents, on both sides, not nearly as much real choice as we ought to
have in education -- and for the simple reason that 'public accountability'
has come to mean simplistic testing for consensus educational goals of
unproven pragmatic or intellectual value. But that was a comparison of my
projection of where the centers of gravity would lie in future
distributions of these two modes of education. It does not deny that there
is and can be, on a smaller scale (which is all the rich require, there
being so few of them), much more and very real diversity of choice.
One can also hear the call for choice as an appeal from those who don't
have the capital to make choice real to Government as the great Equalizer
... give us the same choice for our children that the privileged have for
theirs.
Is education to be immune from the economic transition in the rest of
society from the mode of mass production to the mode of customized
production? How could it be?
JAY.
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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>
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