Re: school, work, and education

Phil Graham (pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au)
Sun, 29 Nov 1998 15:50:54 +1100

Australia has really good advocates for socially oriented education like
Eva Cox, Simon Marginson, Michael Pusey, Brian Crittenden, Bob Lingard, and
other such folk. However, it seems that regardless of what they come up
with in the way of research, the government chooses to listen to "captains
of industry" "financiers" and economists when deciding what to do about
education.

And an "everybody should be studying x, y, or z" approach (especially if
its for x, y, z purpose ONLY) can only damage education and therefore
society. As such, I think that (by the sounds of it) School to Work stands
in opposition to School to Life. Probably, a School to Society approach
would be my ideal approach (HA!).

>What is wrong with a world in which each of us knows
>quite a number of very different things really well?

Nothing.

>Do we even know whether there are more people in the world or more
>projects/topics/special interests?

Surely there must be more of the latter, each person having more than 1.
That's kind of a Russellian paradox though I guess.

Are people's interests self-interest, or "other" interests?

>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.

Educators are a funny lot, as are the people who design education(s) (not
necessarily the same lot). Quite often, there's a presupposition among them
that what is taught is what is learned and vice versa. Similarly, there's a
predominating presupposition that learning is confined to the strict realms
of the classroom/lecture theatre/university/school and stops dead at the
point at which the student graduates (thus gaining a marketable label: the
degree/certificate/diploma). In other words, that the only real learning is
that which is "done" formally. The corollary to this is the "life-long
learning" red-herring (too long to go into detailed implications of this,
but the bottom line is that it serves business interests to have such a
concept out and about). Of course, life _is_ learning (even if one learns
not to learn).

>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.

I don't think you can separate teaching and learning a given curriculum
from "work" tout court (the curriculum being a static irrelevance in this
sense). If you are talking about businesses/corporations, then there are
only two motives: profit and survival (which is really only one motive).
How this is translated into practice is irrelevant. These are merely means
to a narrow end. Studying, teaching, and learning are as much work as is
working the numbers in a credit hedge, figuring out where to put the next
McDonalds franchise, or throwing together a 30" advert or a movie.

>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.

When major universities begin closing down their humanities faculties in
favour of accountancy schools, society will suffer. One can easily say that
such and such a world reproduces such and such phenomena without curricular
help, however, if curricula become increasingly narrowed to include only
that which churns out good corporate soldiers, then society will suffer for
it. Useful knowledge does disappear from time to time, and is more often
suppressed than lost.

This has all happened before.

>Just what really lies outside
>the world of work that one could construct a useful curriculum for?

Nothing. The critical question is: "what role does education have outside
_corporate_ outcomes?"

Corporate interests are the bugaboo here, not the world of work (the social
(re)production process) per se, which, as you point out, includes
everything that people do.

>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.

This phenomenon, too, manages to reproduce itself fairly well without much
curricular assistance. There are no courses I know of entitled "Oppression
101". Nevertheless, one might easily assume there were a central think-tank
handing out instructions and funding for such a course of study.

>Perhaps "no curricula at all" is not such a ridiculous idea.

Interestingly, there is a primary school in my town that takes precisely
this approach. Apparently, it works well. Children have almost unlimited
resources and unlimited choice of study program. They must set themselves a
direction and pursue it. If they don't want to set themselves a course,
they are not punished, they merely get bored and eventually do it anyway.
This is all second hand from someone who attended the school. If you or
anyone else is interested in talking to this person (now an excellent
educator) about the school, I can contact them and ask them to write or
whatever.

In my understanding, attendance is (predictably) expensive.

I, for one, will try anything other than have corporate interests dictating
what's on and off the agenda for education.

Phil
Phil Graham
pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html