We certainly cannot yet make robots capable of sustaining contradictions so
easily as we humans do.
Quality and standards are needed on a society-wide scale; none of us wants
to live in a society where people we depend on have no idea what
constitutes a job well done. On the other hand teaching and upholding such
standards is recruited to serve the interests of our current social elites
only at the institutional scale of the grading and record-keeping practices
of the school or university. We have certainly been over this ground often
enough on xmca in the past. Evaluative feedback to the student does not
have be institutionally translated into an academic record that is later
used to justify giving some people opportunities for more comfortable,
satisfying and socially influential lives and denying such lives to others.
A rather sloppy and perhaps inaccurate application of my current
multiple-scales model of social systems would suggest that while our
individual acts can't do much to influence the society-wide scale
formations directly, they can influence the institutional-level formations,
within the latitude available from the constraints at the higher, more
slowly-changing social scales. We could move to affirm Quality and
Standards in our schools and universities at the same time we opt out of
the Great Sorting. If we did, other institutions would tend to take over
the Sorting, but society would change, in some unpredictable ways, and
schools and universities would change in at least some, more predictable,
positive ways. HOW we could opt out, or at least significantly reduce our
institutional coupling into the Sorting, is a solvable problem of strategy.
It requires looking at the relevant economics, politics, and ideologies
from the individual scale (us and our colleagues, students) to the
institutional scale (governance forms, budget dependencies) to the
trans-institutional scale (resource inputs and trade-offs, political
authorities). It's a classic political problem: how to mobilize resources
from the lowest level to reorganize the intermediate level in ways that are
permitted by the constraints from the higher level, resulting over time in
change in all three levels. Just as this kind of social change cannot be
accomplished by the isolated actions of individuals, so it also cannot be
prevented by general social structures. It is similar in logic to Mike
Cole's mesogenetic strategies, but easier insofar as it does not require
the creation of entirely new institutional forms. It is also, contrary to
general belief, not necessarily incremental or reformist: it can have
radical, revolutionary, large-scale (and small-scale) consequences -- they
just don't happen to be predictable.
JAY.
PS. sitting on my desk is an appeal from a student who still wants an
A-minus grade from last spring changed to a full A grade ... this is no
longer mainly an issue of quality, as I've already explained very clearly
just what was lacking and she's tried to remedy some of the defects
retroactively (partly successfully) ... she is now concerned solely about
her record and the consequences for her future, and has explained her
analysis in detail ... (there are perhaps some personality factors involved
as well, as she somewhat grudgingly admits).
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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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