Mike, I would say that schools are contested
territory,
or activity systems with lots of cotradictions, buds
and shoots. They're heterogenous and alive, and
people
make use of all their multiple intelligences to
negotiate the work, the learning, the teaching, the
fights, the peace ... and sometimes, it's not enough.
Eugene, I still respectfully disagree with you and
interpret Deplit differently - and it's nice to know
I can and we'll still talk to each other. I do agree
with you about McDermott - I remember a particular
piece he wrote in the _AEQ_ that was entitled
something
akin to 'Contemplating school failure. Again.' In
that piece, he pointed out how the tools of
measurement
and standardization cannot but create failure. It's
built in. And of course, the tools are designed or
congruent with various sorting functions, and these
are tied to status hierarchies that have been with
a number of cultures for quite some time.
What's interesting about schools is that they are not
just sorting places. They are also tied to other
goals, other motives made manifest in teacher concerns
about their students, in 'emergency response teams' of
trauma specialists and psychologists when something
goes awry, in school nurses and libraries and many
other niches. I think schools are very much tied into
the utopian project begun in 'el siglo de las luces,'
the age of enlightenment. At the very end of a Cuban
novel by that same title, the two main characters
decide that despite serious dilemmas & shortcomings,
despite having landed on the road to hell with the
best enlightenment intentions, enlightenment ideals
were still worth holding on to.
The heterogeneity of schools is an opening for me,
a place to start. I'll try to write more later,
genevieve
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