Mary-- In identifying the "positive bias" in studies of education you
are putting your finger on a point that has, I believe, wide implications.
As many have emphasized, formal education is a sorting mechanism in addtion
to/alongside of its "social capital/developmentally positive" function. That
is, failure is constituitive of formal education. So far as I can tell, that
has been true for about 6,000 years.... the records get murkey when the
clay tablets crumble.
The Varenne and McDermott book is all about the double-sidedness of
education. The topic is really tough to deal with, because so much
of the work of education is silenced/hidden within/behind "normal practice."
So, for example, Ray Mcdermott and I have somewhat different interpretations
of what could be involved in the notion of a learning disability, one of
those delightful """""" categories that allows ideology masking as science
free reign and makes analysts
' tasks in trying to parse the processes involved very difficult if not
impossible (as in the case Ray and I worked on together with others).
mike
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