Just the theme of a possible research proposal a group of us here are
working on. And a theme sounded in some recent evaluation reports on system
reform: no one has done a very concrete job of identifying just what counts
as "high quality" education from actual examples where it really happens
... and no one has done a very good job of getting beyond the
one-size-fits-all mentality to parse out what aspects of the examples of
high-quality are site-specific and what aspects are potentially
site-adaptable elsewhere. We jump too soon to the information-poor level of
the abstract. We do the wrong kind of generalization (make it more
abstract, then transfer it); we need a science of the particular ... we
need to understand how "high quality" ought to be different in each site,
not how it should be the same in each site. But that kind of science would
not support centralized bureaucratic power and control, would it?
I do think screaming does some good. Rationality alone is not the answer to
our present dilemma. There must come a point when we just say "this is
crap", it is an insult to our intelligence and our humanity. But you are
right, there is then an obligation to provide alternatives. But they are
not, I think, minor alternatives ... better standards, better evaluation
measures ... they must be an alternative paradigm in some much more
fundamental sense. And I think one key to that different paradigm is a
strong move away from uniformity and standardization ... that in some sense
every student should learn a different and unique assemblage of knowledges
and skills, should follow a different pathway in learning, should be
evaluated as a unique work of human achievement and not by any uniform or
directly comparative set of Procrustean standards. This is an extreme
version, but it makes the point.
I am also not arguing for a totally individualistic approach to education.
The value of uniqueness is in its unique contribution to collaborative
partnerships. Just as learning is fundamentally social and collaborative in
how we learn, so it should also be a primary goal of education that we
learn how to partner with others who differ from us on many dimensions ...
NOT so that we can partner with ANYONE ... we also have to recognize the
uniqueness of collaboratives; not all combinations work. We have to learn
how to tell who we can effectively work with, and what kind of
complementary partners we need for various sorts of tasks, or how to find
this out.
A rationality that emulates the science of electrons, all of which are
functionally identical, is not rational if applied to people (or schools,
or cities, or collaborative groups, or classrooms), whose VALUE is in their
potential to be unique. And unpredictable, especially in combination.
Nor would this paradigm eliminate common foundations ... every path to high
quality passes through the truly essential principles and knowledges of our
cultural tradition ... that is in effect a matter of definition, of their
inevitability. The REST of what gets canonized in the curriculum has no
empirical basis whatsoever ... no one KNOWS what everyone needs to know,
what is actually most widely USED ... curricula are not based on
ethnographic observations, but on received opinion, on what someone WANTS
people to know or do ... or in rare cases, as in medicine, on 'best
practice' which has empirical support ... but apart from circular reasoning
(GIVEN this not-empirically-based school curriculum, the empirically best
way for teachers to teach it is ...), the notion of 'best practice' itself
depends on the functional equivalence of practices ... which is already
iffy in the case of medicine (what is best practice for most is not good
practice for some because even biologically there is a lot of individual
uniqueness in people), and almost entirely uncredible in the case of education.
Scream for reason's sake; articulate for passion's.
JAY.
At 02:31 PM 8/7/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>How does change happen? I mean we can let out a good scream, but what good
>does that do? If we think the current system is messed up, what do we do? My
>impression is that folks creating and "inspecting" these standards believe
>in what they are doing. Schools should help people learn things. It ought to
>be possible to specify what those things are and measure whether they have
>been learned. Is the problem that we haven't done a good job of specifying
>those learnings or measuring their attainment? Then we need to fix that. If
>the problem is that our whole conception of schooling is wrong, then we need
>to show compelling examples of where we got it right. Most folks, myself
>included, are going to keep doing things the way they always have unless
>they can be shown compelling examples of something better. So if WE (XMCA)
>ruled the world, what would those examples look like? And how would we know
>they were better?
>
>djc
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Geoff Hayward
>[mailto:geoff.hayward@educational-studies.oxford.ac.uk]
>Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 2:40 AM
>To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: Re: Education reform, was Re(3): job
>
>
>Ah Jay but Martin has not told you the half of it. We also get inspected,
>line by line, against those 'standards' even when everybody involved
>recognises it is a meaningless process and have to deal with inane questions
>of when exactly do we do X when X is embedded throughout a programme of
>teacher education. You spend your life ticking lists rather than thinking
>much harder with colleagues in schools how to educate beginning science
>teachers (in my case).
>
>Geoff Hayward
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Jay Lemke" <jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu>
>To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 3:05 AM
>Subject: Education reform, was Re(3): job
>
>
> > 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>
> > ---------------------------
> >
> >
> >
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:02 PDT