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FW: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest
Hi all,
Below is a conversation Mike and I were having off-list - by mistake I think. Anyway, for anybody who is interested. I hope this makes it there.
Michael
Your comment about enculturation really made me think. What is the purpose of education, is it enculturation or is it progress. Do we teach (and learn) in order to become part of a community so that we are better able to work together to solve problems, or do we teach and learn so those who are part of our community will be able to recognize dangers and opportunities when they occur and develop plans that often run counter to traditions and established culture in order to solve them. On one day I think it is enculturation and on another day I think it is progress.
Of course it is both, but I am left struggling to figure out how it is both. It is certainly not a duality, because when it is a duality the two so often appear to be diametrically opposed (conservativism vs. progressivism?) But of course they can't be because they are both so necessary in the evolutionary scheme you suggest. And yet it seems the two are always at odds with each other, and it has been a source of tension it seems in conceptualizations of education as long as I can remember.
Maybe less complex was the wrong word for Appalachia and India, perhaps a better explanation is more visceral, and an acceptance of that visceral nature of education without believing there is anything wrong about it. The reason I am thinking so much about the Appalachian issue is going through some transcripts of focus groups we did within a community with Appalachian roots and a very middle class, suburban community. What is striking about the Appalachian community is the degree to which they know exactly what they want from the schools (and feel that in many cases a central educational bureacracy will not give it to them) - a place for their child to feel safe, not in the hiding sense but so that they have a sense of belonging, and are able to take that sense of belonging out in to their local community. The more I think about it the more they are talking about a feeling, a sense of communal well being that would be difficult to measure in the tradiitonal sense. When the subject of tests came up there is anger and annoyance and they are seen as something of a distraction. I had not thought about school being a place where year learn community by being part of the community before, but if not in school then where? (Sometimes we leave this aspect of education to things like religious communities). The middle class suburban focus groups were more what you would expect them to be, safety mean keeping people who would do harm out (to the point where the schools become enclosed camps where even parents are not welcome) and the most important thing is tests.
I guess I don't have as strong a sense of India because this comes from reading other people, secondary observations I guess. But education in many of the small villages also seems kind of visceral, especially among the most oppressed members of the community - the women. People who are that oppressed know that they are that oppressed and what they want is education that will get them out of this situation. In these communities much of the critical education occurs within in non-governmental orginzations or community based organizations. But the reasons for their goals are very immediate, and the barriers to reaching those goals are very immediate and transparent as well. A woman who is beaten by her husband or burned because he dowry was not big enough knows she wants to change because of the obvious misey of her life. She also might want her daughter to escape this everyday drudgery. Two things stand in the way - she knows the power that the larger traditions have over both their lives and that when outsiders have come in it has not been for good, and as selfish as it might seem, she might need her daughter's help to survive in just everyday life - so both mother and daughter hold back from education, not on a rational level - well yes, on a rational level, but on a rational level that is more visceral than we normally think about it. Successful education is about going in and meeting these immediate, transparent, visceral goals (e.g. building a school within walking distance) that these women know at a very deep level.
For kids on the South Side of Chicago as you say things are really different. I think they have visceral goals that they want to meet, much the same as the Appalachian community, that they want this strong community that they can trust - but these types of goals are dismissed. The people on the South Side of Chicago are told over and over again that there is really only one avenue to socially acceptable success - you must do well on standardized tests, you must incorporate the cultural capital of the larger society, you must get in to college - and most confusing you must leave behind your community. It is, as you say, a race to the top where only a few will make it out. The others will be left behind. One of the reasons I have so much trouble with Teach for America is that it completely reinforces this narrative. The people in the neighborhoods of Chicago have needs just as visceral and just as immediate as the women in the villages in India, but they come to believe that these local goals are actually detrimental to making it, will take you further away from success in mainstream society, that your will be labeled an outcast or even a criminal. A great example is the way ACORN is treated in our society. Perfect example of local goals, an uneven but very sincere organization that is really tapped in to local needs and goals. And they are labeled as criminals!! No, the only goals that you can have are those that are determiend and acceptable by the larger society. This makes both recognition and use of true goals that will engage the majority of youth I think so much more abstract, and so much more difficult than you might find in the Appalachian community above or the mythic Indian village I described.
This makes me think about how Teach for America might actually work. Take the kids from Harvard and Princeton and instead of putting them directly into the classroom, have them work with ACORN or some CBO for two years and then put them in to the classroom in that community. A way to combine the belief systems of the larger society with the community goals and needs that will engage both students and their parents.
Okay, this went on way too long and is way to rambling and if you read this far I thank you.
Michael
________________________________
From: mike cole [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com]
Sent: Sun 1/24/2010 4:47 PM
To: Michael Glassman
Subject: Re: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest
Michael-- Kept on thinking about your note and had a task taken off my dish, so a moment to pursue the question of goals of education further.
Presumably, education is a specialization of enculturation; both are part of the human mode of adaptation/transformation of the environment/self relation that is (continuing - for the moment) human evolution. What has me hung up and continuing to think are the senses in which the situation in Appalachia or India are less complex. What worries me is scale. Is it that the communities you were speaking of are relatively isolated, so the horizon of goals of education, human survival, feel more local and identifiable, whereas if you live on the South side of Chicago the local and more global are hip to haunch, temporally and spatially? That the "global"
overwhelm and render irrelevant the local?
I also am trying to figure out perspectival issues. Clearly local people have a privileged view on what their problems are such that particular forms of education appear desirable to them. But what if they are handed teachers from outside (where else would they come from) who have bought into the transcendent value of, say, getting to the top we are all urged to race to.
How would schooling (never mind if it educes anything or not!) need to be transformed to reach local goals if it went hand in glove with failing in school? What would schooling look like if those who were last became first?
Thanks for your time in reading this, never mind if you can take time to
help me along with my ruminations a bit.
mike
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 11:20 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu> wrote:
Mike,
The goals in Chicago are just so much more complex than the goals either in Appalachia or in the villages of India. I think a large part of the issue is transience and alienation, and the fact that so many families are dependent on a larger culture to help them understand goals (really where we understand our common goals is through communication and common cause with those who are in like circumstances - but the way many Chicago communities are set up it is almost impossible. An interesting thing is that I sort of have an idea of the goals of Appalachia and India because recently we did some research with an Appalachian community on their values about schools, and I lived in India years ago and developed a real interest in the issues people there are dealing with - this led me to keep reading people who write about the region such as Amartya Sen and Deepa Narayan, and even Martha Nussbaum (Interestingly I don't really like Schweder's work in India so much).
But I have never lived in the types of Chicago neighborhoods that this reform was aimed at and I have not read any good research (although I am sure it must be out there). I have become really interested in the work that Saul Alinsky did in The Back of the Yards in Chicago, which in many ways reflects the same conditions as the neighborhoods the Rennassance project was supposed to help. There were a couple of things thought - one that it was an immigrant neighborhood while high in crime was not that transient. The Polish and other middle European workers were there for the second generation by that time and they knew each other. Many of them also worked together in the packing plant. But most important Alinsky went and lived with them and completely eschewed the whole academic approach by trying to find out what it was they really wanted - not what they were told they would want - but what they really wanted. And then he helped them organize to work together to get it, creating some of the earliest community based organizations that still exist to this day (to Alinsky's despair they did not then go out and help other neighborhoods but used their organizations to move towards the middle class). As I see it this is the only way to understand the goals in the neighborhoods in Chicago, but I am not sure how you do this in current circumstances.
I think the approach the World Bank is taking in Third World countries is the best hope. You go in an try and find community leaders (the real ones not the fake ones) and you have them help you to communicate with people about what their goals are and then without judgment help them achieve those goals in a way that is not primarily to reinforce social narratives. The thing about Chicago is that probably the different neighborhoods have different goals.
So it comes back to something of a cliche - it is not about defining goals but about developing a process to allow people to understand what their true goals are and work together to meet them.
Michael
________________________________
From: mike cole [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com]
Sent: Sun 1/24/2010 12:51 PM
To: Michael Glassman
Subject: Re: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest
Michael--
I was seeking to get you articulate the GOALS of education for people in Chicago, especially the marginalized, in the same terms you did for
Apalachia and India (?- I forget now, but poor agricultural area).
A collection of cases where "re-form" of education has worked on local, regional, national scales, to what ends, and with what long term consequences seems to me an important task to give us more to think with. Perhaps it has been done?
mike
On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 6:22 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu> wrote:
I think one of the problems with the whole Chicago issue is not only was it top down and imposing of values on a population that did was not necessarily in the position to value them
It was based on the underpants gnome model of educational reform - taken from the underpants gnome model of business
In case your not familiar with one of the new, hot touchstones in our cultural Zeitgeist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underpants_gnomes
1. Close down poorly performing schools
2. ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
3. Universal literacy in reading and mathematics!!!
What has amazed me is the way this model really has come to dominate our society in so many ways over the last couple of decandes.
Michael
________________________________
From: mike cole [mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com]
Sent: Sat 1/23/2010 5:08 PM
To: Michael Glassman
Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest
Michael-- Yep, there will be lots of local goals. There is an interesting review of a book on Appalachia higher ed for women and its pathway-forming influences on their lives, in the most recent issue of MCA (the one with all the play articles). The pathways of the women who returned from higher ed were indeed complex. Check it out.
I am guessing here, but I am guessing that in both locations you mention, failure rates are quite high. In Liberia in the late 1960's and 1970's local people in small
villages hoped that through the massive waste of time and their kids labor and costs, one family member might make it through to some role in the central government both to protect them and siphon off money for them, such siphoning being one of the perks of such positions.
With respect to the reading/goal achieving cart/horse problem. My guess is that it cuts both directions in the big picture, but that learning to decode language into writing systems with no clearer goal than avoiding trouble from adults is the major arrangements world wide, with some patches of Deweyian inversion so that acquiring literacy is a means to a goal. But, whichever way it works, eventually
a lot, in a lot of places, experience failure to reach whatever level of schooling counts as economic/socioculural success for them. Reduced family sizes of women with some education appears one of the few generalizable consequences, with a variety of sequalia.
What about the students in the greater Chicago school system? It was the failure of the reform effort there that spurred this particular threadlet.
mike
On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu> wrote:
Mike,
I think there is a strong, non-universal relationship between what are the goals and motivations of education and the local community. An Apalachian community which has been together for generations may want an educational system that focuses on feeling safe, maintaining ties, while at the same time building necessary bridges to other communities. In Andre Pradesh the community may want individuals who are able to serve as members of the Pancheyet in ways that bring clean water and roads to the community, or that break the class system. Or there may be local communities that want to break some of the larger, institutional traditions that hold them back. An upper middle class community in the United States wants the students to be able to perform on the types of standardized tests that will get them in to a top college. These are all very different goals and very different motivations.
If I ran for the school board in my community, Dublin Ohio, on the idea that we should be creating Community Based Organizations that allow us to better take care of our weak, challenge institutions, change life trajectories people would look at me like I am crazy. If I went in to an one of those communities in Andre Pradesh or even an Appalachian community here and said I want to really work on raising test scores people would look at me like I am crazy.
Now of course there are some skills that help across a range of issues, but here is the big question I have been thinking about a lot,
Do we learn to read because we believe it is a skill that will help us meet our goals.
Or is it that in trying to reach our goals we learn skills such as reading.
Michael
________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of mike cole
Sent: Sat 1/23/2010 12:59 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest
OK, Michael, so lets adopt your narrative. What is the impact?
Improved number of years remaining in school? Range of activities that
graduates are capable of engaging in? Increased unemployment of the
educated? Decreased birth rate? Etc.
It is precisely the implications underlying terms such as impact that are on
my alleged mind.
mike
On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>wrote:
> What's interesting is that the article mentions the World Bank research but
> only a small portion of it that agrees with current narratives. Much of the
> World Bank research on education suggests that organizing communities at a
> local level, giving them responsibility and creating working relationships
> between larger national school institutions and local CBOs has the greatest
> impact. But that doesn't fit our current narrative so of course nobody is
> going to mention this.
>
> Michael
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Andy Blunden
> Sent: Sat 1/23/2010 9:24 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest
>
>
>
> Education: Reaching the poorest
> Enrolling the world's poorest children in school needs new
> thinking, not just more money from taxpayers
>
>
> http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15330592
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Hegel Summer School
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/hss10.htm
> Hegel, Goethe and the Planet: 13 February 2010.
>
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