For those of us in Education in the US, and probably also elsewhere, there
were echoes a-plenty in the discussion of Davidov's hegelian-universal
democratic-elitism of the current approach to "standards-based" educational
reform here.
Given that employers started complaining that US school graduates were
hardly even economically exploitable as employees, so poor were their
literacy and numeracy skills, and their basic factual knowledge, the
government prodded educators to define a set of universal (i.e. national)
standards of what "every child" should learn, so that "no child is left
behind" and all can be economically exploited for their valuable labor.
So "progressives" here said: yes, we must be sure that all students get a
good basic education and eliminate the low expectations and second-class
courses given to the children of the poor and the nonwhite, so we will make
a standard curriculum for every child. Conservatives smiled and thought:
finally we can get rid of the random educational diversity which interferes
with creating larger-scale educational markets and more standardized
labor-as-product. And both agreed that there is a universal knowledge for
all, and everyone should just get with the program and accept it.
And the teachers sadly see their own personalized voices limited in the
interests of better exam marks for their students, and their students
personalized thinking limited to give more time to the standard curriculum
and preparation for standard examinations. And the elite are protesting
that if this boring basic curriculum is going to be all their kids get in
school, what social class advantages in cultural capital will keep them
ahead of the pack? (They don't want to actually spend much time passing
this capital on to their kids personally.)
Unlike Davydov the US standards are not much interested in high-order
theoretical thinking. They are not elitist in the sense of privileging that
mode. But they democratically insure that nobody learns much of anything
they are interested in (good preparation for the world of wage-labor) nor
much of anything that is likely to rock the boat, or even give access to
alternative ways of imagining what a better boat might be like. We might
like a more diverse educational diet than Davydov offers, but at least it
was a nourishing one compared to the starvation fare of the US curricula.
So, another contradiction: theoretical thinking has two kinds of value in
the social field, relative value and functional value. It marks you out as
someone superior and entitled to class privileges, and it's actually useful
for a few things. But if you democratize it, it loses its "value of
distinction" (Bourdieu), and we then have to face realistically just what
it is and is not good for. Davydov's program would probably lead to this
longterm outcome, which sounds pretty good to me, even if I don't agree
with his hegelian universal privileging of the theoretical mode (despite
it's being my personal favorite).
I also think Davydov's program is one of the few I can imagine that could
compete politically with the "standards" movement now dominating (and
probably destroying) US education. I don't think that personalizing
education is going to appeal to anyone but the students, and maybe some of
the teachers. I don't think it has any political chance at all. (I am of
course in favor of it otherwise. In fact I favor a more radical version
than Eugene's: I don't think there is any longer any point now in our
historical epoch to define a common curriculum for all students past about
year 7; the rest should be completely individualized.)
So, does anyone have any ideas towards a model of education that is (a)
democratic, (b) functional, and (c) politically viable?
JAY.
PS. By "functional" I mean: really useful for doing things you want to do,
and helpful in imagining new kinds of things you might want to do
(including changing the kinds of things it's possible for you and others to
do).
Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Tel. 734-763-9276
Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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