Re: the calculus wars

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Fri, 21 May 1999 00:24:08 -0400

Very interesting to hear of Graham's student's findings about the
non-relationship between the curriculum and the workplace ... I think one
could extend the conclusion to the rest of normal life as well. There is
also implicit in the account, it seems, a very old educational maxim, of
the kind not found in textbooks but in the oral literature of the field,
that the elementary school curriculum is for life and the working class
workplace, and the secondary curriculum is for middle class managers and
their gamesmanship in and out of the workplace. The oldstyle college
curriculum was just an expensive, and therefore exclusionary, extension of
the secondary and its role. All this was probably exactly correct until the
60s. After a brief flirtation with 'relevance' to students' lives and
perceived needs and interests, education shifted instead toward technicism
('relevance' to employers' needs and interests), first at tertiary level
(study economics and computers, not literature and philosophy) and now
incipiently at secondary level.

Re those disciplinary voices you hear over your shoulder, Graham, I've
heard them too, and even voiced them from time to time. The traditions of
the disciplines do give us powerful tools and perspectives, and many of
them are well worth learning, at least in part, on their own terms. But a
discipline, as such have come to be, is like a self-reproducing automaton:
it seeks to colonize replicants and clone itself 'with progress' from
generation to generation. That's anti-intellectual of course, as well as
anti-educational, and educators have to say so. No discipline has the right
to autonomy within the curriculum; all must be subject to critique from
alternative, external perspectives, and all must be open to appropriation
into human projects that overflow arbitrary disciplinary boundaries.

There is also a substantial hypocrisy in the arguments for disciplinary
autonomy in education. The argument is that to know mathematics you must
know it as a mathematician does, and not simply as a physicist or economist
does. I will agree with that as one part of what it means to know
mathematics. But if mathematics educators really meant that, they would
devise curricula in which students actually do what mathematicians do, and
try to do all that mathematicians do (cf. the Bruner heresy) ... whereas
what students do in their curricula is by and large nothing at all like
what mathematicians really do. And the same is the case for science
curricula and every other discipline as well (though perhaps least so for
performing arts, or other disciplines regarded as less academic).

But even the most authentic mathematical experience is still only part of
what it means to be educated about, as well as in, mathematics. 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>
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