Where is this customised production taking place? It's a complete myth! A
recent world-wide study (I don't have the ref to hand and I'm rushing to
finish 634 things at once - please excuse any perceived terseness[?])
showed that an overwhelming majority of children (who could afford it)
throughout developed and developing countries were dressed in Nikes(TM),
drinking coke(TM), eating McDonald's burgers(TM), and worshipping Michael
Jordan(TM), etc. Capitalism has merely decentralised an increasingly
homogenising production process to go where the cheap labour is (educated
labour is expensive, best to let that go). Meanwhile, profits are
increasingly centralised. Labour is fragmented and exploited at an
unprecedented rate.
In short, the picture is not one of customised production, but one of
homogenised production, distribution, and hegemonically motivated cultural
preferences. There was an article by some proto-fascist in the New York
Times magazine recently saying that the US is doing well to 'act like the
global power it is' and enforce its homogenous products on the world
(anyone who wants the ref, let me know - i'm running). The quotable quote
was 'McDonalds could not exist without McDonnell Douglas' ... and so on.
This is scary stuff. But not even the US is benefiting from the trend!. US
companies have no more loyalty to the military machine they claim as their
own than they do to China or Iraq (whom they also arm).
Libertarianism and anarchy (far right and far left) are interchangeable,
both are as ideological as each other. Molly argues against this and that
ideology, but we must all ask ourselves what our ideals (viz our ideology)
are. No one, nowhere, is ever ideology-free and all claims to the contrary
are to be treated with extreme suspicion. The neo-liberal (and
neo-conservative) agendas are just neo-classic economics writ large. Fine
nuances separate the extremes. That's it. That's the Third Way.
As Nate, Ken, and David K note, the trench warfare will spill out of minds
and pages onto streets. This is unnecessary and wasteful. An illiterate
society will be no more well equipped to protect itself from the violence
of ideologues than will a literate one. To argue to the contrary is crazy.
Revolution and violence is rarely followed by emancipation. We need
something new.
If people thought school did them a bad turn, just sit back and cheer on
the current trajectory. Just wait and see what the alternative is. It's
ugly and it's all been done before. Unfortunately, the interest group
politics have long ago lost the plot and given over everything to the God
of Change in the faikth that any change must be good. This is clearly not
the case.
Customised production and flexible delivery, paradoxically, demands a rigid
content that no curriculum could imagine.
Public schooling is a public good. Its success rests on the skills and good
intentions of good teachers. As Jay once wrote to me: "remember, it's not
subjects you are teaching; it's people."
No degree of faulty curriculum can overcome an ideology like that. Teach
people, not "stuff". What I mean is that ideology is not necessarily a bad
thing. But _not_ knowing that one is ideological is ultimately destructive
because then you becomes the holder of "the one truth" and thus you may
righteously close your mind to all alternatives, existing, potential, or
imagined.
Phil (writing from the bowels of a business school)
Phil Graham
p.graham who-is-at qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html
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"Another damned fat book, eh, Mr Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh,
Mr Gibbon?" - The Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon upon the publication
of "Decline and Fall".
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