Re: Education reform, was Re(3): job

From: Geoff Hayward (geoff.hayward@educational-studies.oxford.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Aug 07 2001 - 00:40:02 PDT


Ah Jay but Martin has not told you the half of it. We also get inspected,
line by line, against those 'standards' even when everybody involved
recognises it is a meaningless process and have to deal with inane questions
of when exactly do we do X when X is embedded throughout a programme of
teacher education. You spend your life ticking lists rather than thinking
much harder with colleagues in schools how to educate beginning science
teachers (in my case).

Geoff Hayward

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jay Lemke" <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 3:05 AM
Subject: Education reform, was Re(3): job

> AAAAAAARGGH !
>
> Is that a good approximation to a scream of exasperation? ... more likely
> just a generic scream of release ...
>
> I suppose I should thank Martin for the link below to the UK's version of
> teacher education standards. I scream in part because I actually looked at
> two of the documents ... mainly out of morbid fascination born of my own
> two years overseeing the compliance of my former teacher education program
> with the similar standardization enterprise of New York State.
>
> I read the voluminous NYS standards several times in their entirety, never
> once finding I could make entirely consistent sense of them, or even parse
> the text in many places. My eyes tended to glaze over, my being rebelled
> against the language, the genre, the register, the meanings, the very fact
> that such documents would exist in a world of serious educated people, the
> implications of their existence for the terminal deadend of modernism's
> strategy for solving real human and social problems.
>
> Have a look, and realize that THAT is what governments today throughout
the
> English-speaking world (at least) consider to be the appropriate response
> to the need for better teachers. Did I say before that modernism has a
> machine-logic in its technologies of social organization? Read some of
this
> stuff and you will get a sense of just how literal I was being. This might
> be how you would program a computer to simulate the most obvious surface
> phenomena of teacher education, without any underlying reality ... as you
> can program a computer to talk back to you like a simulation of a Rogerian
> therapist.
>
> Regulation. Standardization. But only in form ... there cannot of course
be
> any such actual standardization in real institutions that continue to
> function ... the indexed features are so trivial that the best and the
> worst programs could have exactly the same description in these terms.
>
> The language ... the forms of language ... are not ones in which it is
> POSSIBLE to say anything useful or significant about education. They are
> the forms of language in which you can provide specifications for
plumbing,
> though they would be equally irrelevant to any useful account of how
> plumbing actually gets done or how to tell good plumbing from bad. They
> derive of course from legal discourse, but they have no grasp on the
> phenomena they are about ... education is only trivially about what people
> know, it is mainly about how we recognize what needs to be known and about
> how we decide how to help people learn. It is about the quality of How,
not
> the quantity or specification of What.
>
> And everyone in the whole history of western civilization who has ever
> written anything taken seriously by experienced educators has known this
> and said so. So this application of modernism is not even modernism at its
> best. It is modernsm at its most mindless, its most frightened, grasping
> for control when it knows things are out of control and that to admit it
is
> to lose at the next election.
>
> Conversely, of course, all these efforts at regulation cannot have much
> real effect. But they deflect effort and attention from any real efforts
to
> improve education.
>
> Resign, Minister! You are either a fool or a knave.
>
> How do we say this not to a man, but to a social technology whose era of
> usefulness is now so clearly past?
>
> JAY.
>
>
> At 02:18 PM 8/6/2001 +0100, you wrote:
>
>
> >We in the UK have been under a number of waves of teacher education
reform
> >in the UK since 1977. The current iteration (with competence based
> >curriculum) is up for renegotiation. The current picture is on
> >http://www.canteach.gov.uk/info/itt/requirements/index.htm
>
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
> CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
> JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
> ---------------------------
>
>
>



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