Re: school, work, and education

Phil Graham (pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au)
Sat, 05 Dec 1998 12:01:12 +1100

Thanks Louise,

Please excuse my invective. It was out of line and beyond xmca protocols. My
apologies.

I responded from a perspective which is, obviously, quite emotionally
loaded, as you may have gathered from my previous posts on this matter.

Where I am, the general run of things is that the corporatised curriculum is
having a much worse effect than the previously "inefficient" model it
replaced. Instead of students becoming more "competent", they are becoming
more illiterate, less critical, more violent.

We now have the highest rate of suicide in the western world among young
people. Speculations are rife about why this is so. In my view, "School to
Work" and "The West Review" (Australia's latest) and other such moves to
corporatision around the world seem to be part and parcel of a general
malaise that says "Corporations do it better". I don't think they do, and
the general run of things seems to bear this out.

Perhaps things will go better in the States. I doubt it.

Once again, my apologies for the emotive, invective tone of my recent posts
on this subject. However, I don't apologise for my stance on the matter,
which, in Australia at least, holds true.

Phil

At 11:29 AM 12/4/98 -0800, you wrote:
>
>
>
>Phil,
>
>I feel compelled to respond to your comments. I'll take them one by one...
>>
>> So what you suggest is to let the corporate sector dictate curriculum so's
>> to get children ready for their immutable, inevitable uptake into corporate
>> life?
>
>Not at all. I think there are plenty of alternative perspectives that
>may be presented in a school environment. But I disagree with you that
>there's much overlap between what happens in a school environment and
>what happens in a corporate environment. These are very distinct
>cultures. And I disagree that because a publishing corporation puts out
>textbooks this necessarily means that those who use such books are
>becoming cookied-cutter corporate peons, which seems to be your implicit
>fear. Research such as Beck and McKeown's, shows that textbooks have
>very little impact on student learning, and, I'm hard-pressed to think of
>a single textbook that made a dent in my psyche over the many years,
>although I can think of the mass of them as excellent bedtime reading.
>Who needs Nyquil when you've got school textbooks to read? My point is
>that you underestimate students and perhaps people in general.
>There's plenty of healthy resistance to anything irrelevant, whether it's
>produced by a corporation or an individual.
>
>> > Not a great idea. Do you have children?
>
>Since you asked, yes I do. Two sons, ages 9 and 7. And so do many
>people who work for corporations, I might add.
>
>
> >
>> Teaching children how "corporate culture works" within a corporatised
>> curriculum will leave little room for giving the tools to reform it (how
>> would this be achieved?). That's because the discourse of corporate culture
>> _is_ the primary tool of its social hegemony. Being such, it is largely
>> invisible and leads to people believing that there is no other alternative,
>> as you, yourself, exemplify.
>
>I'd really appreciate some specific examples of "corporatized"
>discourse. I think one of the potential powers of classroom discussion
>is that it can reveal the gaps and assumptions in textbooks, literature,
>news
>articles, campaign speeches, M-TV, academic studies and all the various
>"texts" that we hear and consume each day. As a former full-time
>reporter, I was consistently impressed with the intelligence of all kinds
>of people from all walks of life. They didn't have PhDs, nor did most of
>them want one, but they had plenty of ability to question the status quo
>and see things from their distinct perspectives. Far from being a
>corporatized world, I have been impressed in my life by the diversity of
>opinion and perspective out there, and the strong resistance to
>conformist thinking.
>
>Finally, I think that figuring out how to provide tools to students to
>critically examine corporate or government decisionmaking and policymaking
>based on economic
>arguments, ethical arguments, political arguments and the like is vitally
>important. You're correct in observing that there is no cookbook recipe
>out there for doing so, but there are plenty of examples in research of
>teachers who find ways to instill a critical, questioning perspective
>within their students. I think of a book by VanSledright and Brophy on
>elementary social studies education a few years back. They did case
>studies on three different teachers and found that each had very distinct
>ways of working with "corporate" textbooks and eliciting creative,
>thoughtful responses from their children.
>
>There's hope.
>
>Louise
>
>>
>> Phil
>> Phil Graham
>> pw.graham who-is-at student.qut.edu.au
>> http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html
>>
>
>
Phil Graham
Queensland University of Technology
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/