If I may, Dale, I'd like to toss in a few more permutations to
your multiple questions.
Historically, when norming was first begun, and Normal Schools
(Les Ecoles Normales) were established, the belief was that the 'norms'
were good, and that is a belief presently perpetuated through multiple
methods of school assessments, such as standardized tests, bell-curve
grades, and IQ assessments.
However, when schools were established, a factory model of
process was utilized, along with a theory of norms. So, lock step, age
segregation, graded, standardized curriculum was implemented, which still
has withstood the rigors of the last hundred years of educational
research. Embedded in the school structure was the belief that education
was passive, transmitted, and most efficiently done in silence and
sitting.
What we know about children now tells us that all children learn
best through movement. Involvement. Experimental approximation.
Practice that reflects community practice. Etc.
The classroom is still built as if there are going to be thirty
bodies sitting quietly - the schools remain in grouping children into
artificial age units of sameness - there are limited physical resources
that match children's needs.
Children who don't fit the norm get labeled into special
education - as Eugene Matusov pointed out which initiated this entire
discussion about coercion - and other children become pathologized and
then medicated with ADHD. (And by the way, the list of behaviors that
are supposed to be markers of ADHD reminds me of the old list of
behaviors that were used as markers for identifying 'hysteria' in women
one hundred years ago. The behaviors are behaviors that the 'culture' or
'community' doesn't like because of the disruptions that it causes.)
So, in this way the 'norm's become acts of coercion, because the
assumption is that the norms are the way people are 'supposed' to
behave. Unless of course, the 'norms' don't fit the system's solution -
in this case, education was supposed to better educate a working
population so that they could be better workers, but it didn't matter
that children need movement to learn, because that was sloppy and
expensive and difficult to manage, administrate and assess.
I think that norms in themselves are interesting. But, somehow
people/science/education forgot that while norms describe an aggregate,
they don't describe an individual.
It's individuals that are being educated, not 'norms'.
Phillip
pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu