Fwd: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

This was sent to me when Michael meant to send to xmca. Forwarding at his
request.
mike

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>
Date: Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 4:59 PM
Subject: RE: [xmca] Education: Reaching the poorest
To: lchcmike@gmail.com


Mike,

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 that we are
going through 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 they became
angry and annoyed and saw them 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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