Re: school-to-work, public-to-private

Louise Yarnall (lyarnall who-is-at ucla.edu)
Mon, 24 May 1999 09:33:15 -0700

I agree with Jay's observations about school-to-work and public-to-private
not necessarily posing a conservative attack on education. Certainly, in
some quarters, these educational alternatives are conservative and elitist.
But I can see clear pragmatic and populist reasons to endorse such programs,
particularly in regards to making education more relevant to the needs of
regular folks. The back-to-basics movement also is not only a conservative
movement, although it has its moments. There's a certain amount of
righteous indignation among people who cannot afford expensive private
education at the difficulty of ensuring that their children can read and
compute. This part of the back-to-basics movement is a reaction to the
teachers who "give up" on inner-city children, for example, because those
kids "don't care anyway."

Louise
---------------
it is not necessarily true that teaching, say,
> mathematics, in relation to the workplace (more obviously for literacy)
> could not be a superior intellectual strategy to teaching it in a purely
> abstract and "decontextualized" academic fashion.
>
> It is also not necessarily true that the same education is most relevant to
> all people's lives. By "the same" here I mean in its content, methods of
> instruction, and goals. Most secondary education in the US today aims, at
> least in the eyes of reformers, at a universal college-bound academic
> model. This really seems unrealistic to me and doomed to failure. Esp.
> since the academic model is almost universally the "decontextualized" model
> (i.e. teaching of formal structures apart from relations to concrete social
> functioning in an actual society), which seems useful ONLY as a passport to
> higher education.
>
> 2. Gordon shared some notes about the World Bank's agenda -- and they're
> not the only ones with it -- for privatization of higher education as a
> means toward higher education reform. I frankly don't think they are as
> crazy, or evil, as may seem at first sight.
>
>