Bill writes:
>
>Owen, it would be good to learn more of your thesis. Post the abstract?
This means a real dragging from the past. The diss was on the
realtionships between school life and work life. I critically reviewd a
number of perspectives on the the relationship. Here are some characatures:
A) Classical positivist psych approach on which occupational outcomes
testing is based and seems to still be the foundation of careers
education. "If you like working in the outdoors then you will become a
farmer or a civil engineer".
B) A psychoanalytical approach ( which in the UK came from the Tavistock
Clinic). If you are working class and want to be a Shakespearian actor
then you are clearly psycho.
C) Socio theraputic approaches (from the Grubb Institute in the UK...
vaguely Rogersian) : if you are in a warm and cuddly school you will adpat
best to work.
D) Human Capital Theory (Lester Pearson et al) : the better qualified you
are the better the job you get, the better the economy
E) Screening Hypothesis (Arrow, Chicago School Economics):
Qualificationism is a screening mechanism, applied on a supply and demand
basis
G) An Althusserian approach: a hightly functionalist application of
Marxism: Schools a s simplistic ideological state apparatus: which seemed
to deny the good intentions opf most teachers I knew.
Most of the careers guidence literature/educators available at the time (
according to my survey) seemed to mirror to some degree or other aspects
of the above. Bowles and Gintis also supplied me with the international
data that seemed to put pay to most of the above hypotheses.
There was model "H", which was supplied by Paul Willis's work "Learning
to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs", which came from
a powerful intellectual current in the UK at the time based around the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham
lead by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall(and a cultural studies movement
elsewhere). << US work by folk like Cicourel, and the socio linguistics
research of the time contributed too>> These kids learned their
anti-school stance and the surivial techniques from their peers and this
in turn prepared them from an oppositional and protective stance when they
entered the workplace. Willis's work was criticised for taking a too male
a perspective at the time, and in fact that was indicative of the narrow
grouping of school students/work aspirations that Willis's work was based
on. Nevertheless, it was a powerful awakening to how social groups can and
do exercise their "relative autonomy" confounding the more
structuralist/functionalist formulations which had preceeded this study.
With hindsight I can see Willis's lad's Activity System: but in turn I can
also see how faced with the complexity of the world before them ( two
years before Margret Thatcher) how they worked to reduce the diversity
rather than open up their variety. The school was complicit in this, as
the lads' culture was one element of diversity the school wanted to close
down as well ( a postion which reinforced their oppositional stance). <<
wherein, Judy, perhaps lies a need for some of the ideas embodied in
viable systems modelling to be incorporates into CHAT. VSM is too
"systematic" and acultural nevertheless there are some useful explanatory
frameworks for modelling "insitutional organisation and diversity" which
Bateson, Beer and Mumford offer..as does autopoeisis (Maturana, Varela
and Spencer-Brown>>
There is of course more....
Martin
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