i also think Peter is being optimistic to believe that the so-called
"bridge" schools will operate as anything more or less than holding tanks
for students/children who are scheduled for social abandonment and
obsolescence...ther will be some islands of 'success,' just enough to be
trotted out in the annual atlanta constitution education supplement and
ooohh'd over and admired...but the rest, because of the 'success' of some
will be further stigmatized by their continued 'failures', which will
subsequently be used to rationalize their being left by the side of the
educational trail (so to speak)...of course the problem will be that,
unlike in previous cases of abandonment of the unfit by the always-moving
herd, these castouts will live...for educational maladies are not fatal to
the individual, not in and of themselves...(howsoever mortal they may be
for the group as a whole; which doesnt see itself leaving behind potential
its imminent (and immanent) destruction...
teachers who teach in those bridge schools will be those welcome nowhere
else, or they will be the youngest, least expereinced...and they will soon
qualify for the administrative equivalent of combat pay...there will be
metal detectors and armed guards, but unlike the schools in the suburbs,
where there will be seen many of the same physical arrangement, but where
the students will be told and be able to believe that the measures are for
their own protection...these bridge school students will not have the
chance to mistake the fact that they are incarcerated there, to pass the
time until they can legally "drop out" (that most wonderful of
euphemisms)...there may be a patina of 'corrective' or 'remedial'
rationalization applied, and it will certainly manifest itelf in more and
more applications of the same pedagogies and curricula that had failed with
those children in the first place...but is anyone so naive as to believe
that this was not a forseen and intentional trajectory precipitated by the
(dare i say 'hegemonic') social forces whose interests are expressed in the
hypostatization of "privatization" as the panacea for all educational...but
in fact all social--programs which 'cost' rather than enrich the corporate
state...cf prisons/juvenile corrections, hospitals/medical care,
school/social services...
(the most powerful, fastest growing union--and the foremost advocate of
more prison building and penal privatization--in california today is the
correctional officers...is this the moment when the union movement, and the
social justice for which it began (at least) sinks wholly into the
corrupted logic of marketplace? screw jesus...what would _debs_ think?)
Peter's doubts about _teaching_ in such an institution begs the question, i
think...there won't be a lot of "teaching" or "learning" going on in any
sense other than that of the cold hard facts of life...any child who lands
in one of these schools will know without a doubt that he/she is a
cast-off, jetsam, too inconvenient to be entertained by the winners in the
world...(call me deacon blues?)...
there will be no doubt a lot of assessment and evaluation, because those
tests are revenue-producing for somebody, and there will be a lot of stuff
therein that looks like Benthamite penology...for these will become nasty
places, where dashed hopes and empty dreams conspire to create a bedlam, an
abattoire environment, of presiding over the doomed...there will never be
any reason for optimism...oh, okay alittle--some saint or something will
take up the cause for the few children she or he reaches and touches...and
it will be held and brandished aloft like a burning sign...but it'll be an
empty sign, or rather one so saturated with unspoken meaning as to deny its
own being both impicitly and expressly...
kids will "graduate" from these places, predictably, regularly,
relentlessly , not with 'diplomas,' but with skills of the kind that are
necessary for eventual interrment into (private!) prisons...will anyone
doubt that, in atlanta, or in any other large, urbanized, diverse school
system, the greatest number of children so consigned will be in one way or
another always already (there you go again with that marxist crap)
marginalized? those who already occupy prison cells in inordinately
disproportionate numbers in relation to their raw percentage of the
population??? and by their very existence and condition bearing sole
'political' responsibility for their own 'failure.'
how convenient
cheers, chers
(ou 33, texas 28)
konopak