AAAAAAARGGH !
Is that a good approximation to a scream of exasperation? ... more likely
just a generic scream of release ...
I suppose I should thank Martin for the link below to the UK's version of
teacher education standards. I scream in part because I actually looked at
two of the documents ... mainly out of morbid fascination born of my own
two years overseeing the compliance of my former teacher education program
with the similar standardization enterprise of New York State.
I read the voluminous NYS standards several times in their entirety, never
once finding I could make entirely consistent sense of them, or even parse
the text in many places. My eyes tended to glaze over, my being rebelled
against the language, the genre, the register, the meanings, the very fact
that such documents would exist in a world of serious educated people, the
implications of their existence for the terminal deadend of modernism's
strategy for solving real human and social problems.
Have a look, and realize that THAT is what governments today throughout the
English-speaking world (at least) consider to be the appropriate response
to the need for better teachers. Did I say before that modernism has a
machine-logic in its technologies of social organization? Read some of this
stuff and you will get a sense of just how literal I was being. This might
be how you would program a computer to simulate the most obvious surface
phenomena of teacher education, without any underlying reality ... as you
can program a computer to talk back to you like a simulation of a Rogerian
therapist.
Regulation. Standardization. But only in form ... there cannot of course be
any such actual standardization in real institutions that continue to
function ... the indexed features are so trivial that the best and the
worst programs could have exactly the same description in these terms.
The language ... the forms of language ... are not ones in which it is
POSSIBLE to say anything useful or significant about education. They are
the forms of language in which you can provide specifications for plumbing,
though they would be equally irrelevant to any useful account of how
plumbing actually gets done or how to tell good plumbing from bad. They
derive of course from legal discourse, but they have no grasp on the
phenomena they are about ... education is only trivially about what people
know, it is mainly about how we recognize what needs to be known and about
how we decide how to help people learn. It is about the quality of How, not
the quantity or specification of What.
And everyone in the whole history of western civilization who has ever
written anything taken seriously by experienced educators has known this
and said so. So this application of modernism is not even modernism at its
best. It is modernsm at its most mindless, its most frightened, grasping
for control when it knows things are out of control and that to admit it is
to lose at the next election.
Conversely, of course, all these efforts at regulation cannot have much
real effect. But they deflect effort and attention from any real efforts to
improve education.
Resign, Minister! You are either a fool or a knave.
How do we say this not to a man, but to a social technology whose era of
usefulness is now so clearly past?
JAY.
At 02:18 PM 8/6/2001 +0100, you wrote:
>We in the UK have been under a number of waves of teacher education reform
>in the UK since 1977. The current iteration (with competence based
>curriculum) is up for renegotiation. The current picture is on
>http://www.canteach.gov.uk/info/itt/requirements/index.htm
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
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