school, work, and education

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Sat, 28 Nov 1998 21:29:53 -0500

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>
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