I strongly agree with Gary's thesis that students not only resist
the educational system but also keep it afloat. They conspire
with us to mitigate the system's blunders, to keep things
tolerable, to keep them going, when perhaps something should by
now have called a halt. This is of course most true of middle-
class students who understand that somehow they will profit from
passage through the system, and least true of those who (possibly
correctly) don't believe they will. I have often identified
another mitigator that lets us just get by: low validity testing.
I really doubt that in-depth assessment would confirm even the
dismal levels of achievement presently claimed for our students.
Things are really much worse than they look in the official
statistics (rather like unemployment).
Gary considers two solution strategies. I would emphasize the
first more than he does: giving students more power to direct
their own educations. I do not doubt that they need expert
knowledge sources, including the meta-knowledge of how to
effectively learn about various human activities. But I do doubt
that we know better than they possibly could what path and
sequence, what selection even, is best for them; especially in
the long run when we count in the changes in their interests as
they begin to learn what they see as relevant. I do not believe
that most of the emphases of the present secondary school
curriculum could really be justified in the face of rigorous
intellectual challenge. Not in relation to the economy or actual
career and life needs, or to any convincing vision of what
knowledge is either necessary or desirable for all or for most.
The dead hand of tradition bears heavily, its canon is culturally
and sociologically straitened, and most of its real functions are
the covert ones of distributing arbitrary passwords for middle-
class recognizability. It is frankly very hard to believe that
students could in fact do worse if we left the choice of what to
study and when entirely in their hands. I know we can help
provide access to what they want to know about, and
apprenticeship into activities, including into ways of learning
to know and to do. I doubt we can know what is best, or even
good, for so many different human beings. We harm them, and our
society, by pretending otherwise.
I think in some ways this _is_ Gary's second strategy: starting
from scratch. Not in how to solve algebraic equations, and not
even in how to learn how to solve them, but in who should learn
these things and when. What would a school be like without a
curriculum? What would a library be like with teachers? What
would a bank of artificially intelligent computer tutoring
systems be like that spanned the range of introductory-level
human knowledge and were on-call at need as a component of a vast
multi-media knowledge-base there to be explored? What would such
an educational technology be like with access to human mentors by
email or videoconferencing? networked to allow co-operative
projects and explorations? extended by opportunities for
observation and participation in adult activities? buttressed by
on-line or face-to-face peer and cross-age discussion groups to
critique, reflect on, challenge, and offer alternatives?
Is it not the case that in our society today, relative to what
could realistically be done, that there is too much education
required, and not enough education available?
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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