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
>