Back to basics

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Thu, 14 Sep 95 00:15:27 EDT

Maybe it's an issue that too many of us have chewed on too often
already -- and left an unpleasant taste in our mouths -- but I
wonder if part of the answer to Mike's query about how progressive
and/or cooperative/collaborative learning approaches will play in
a conservative political climate doesn't have to include some
better sense of just what dissatisfactions are driving the appeal
of 'back to basics'.

While some people are just genuinely tired of the rate of change
of modern society and wish it would stop, more people, I think
are critical of the failures of education, guided by mainly
upper-middle class sensibilities, to respond to the needs of
students lower down in the social hierarchy, as they and their
home communities construe what those needs are.

I will be very interested to read what Angel Lin's study shows
about Hong Kong classrooms, but while there may be bad ways to
let labor markets drive educational agendas, there are certainly
also foolish ways to ignore the reality of labor markets for
those with the least social capital to manoeuvre around them.
'Basics' for many people means that their kids will be able to
command the minimal skills needed for success in the workplace
beyond entry level positions in service jobs, but short of
becoming professionals or senior managers. They are probably
even more conscious of the need for critical perspectives than
we are (but may not see education as necessary to produce them
in people whose lives embody social contradictions and
conflicts of interest vs. middle class students for whom life
mirrors middle-class illusions and ideologies). They may have
less reason to emphasize theoretical and abstract forms of
reasoning, and I do not think it incontrovertibly established
that these forms are in fact better adapted to all forms of
work and life than their more concrete and situated counter-
parts. But what angers them above all, is that it is just the
basic skills that they most need, and which they lack the
home community advantages to obtain (because these skills are
defined as the basics of middle-class life), that are most
looked down upon and regarded as beneath the interest of
serious academic curricula and teaching.

The political delusion that most Americans are middle-class,
except by bizarre redefinitions of terms, makes us too often
forget, I think, that many people who support 'back to basics'
are really working-class in their values and life-experiences.
In the present political economy, their main concern is that
their children do not slip down even further into the permanently
unemployed and unemployable underclass. They expect education
to place a 'safety net' under their kids, and by and large it
is not doing this, while its progressive practitioners seem
to worry mainly about other concerns, more fashionable and
more wonderful, for those with this luxury.

If we are going to get a more critical and theoretically
sophisticated curriculum that is acceptable to the majority
of people, and students, we perhaps need to begin by
understanding just why 'back to basics' makes sense to so
many. Their consciousness is not a false one; it is informed
by experience in a particular social position which is not
the position of many of us. I do not identify with that
position, or fully understand it. But I understand that it
exists, and that educators do not, by and large, pay it the
attention it deserves. Productive dialogue begins with the
effort to understand the other person's point of view, not
with new ideas on how to win them over to your own. And it may
end with compromises that require a sacrifice of your own
interests and those of your own social caste -- if you are
willing to do so when you have the power not to. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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