Gary, Jay et al.
Sorry for my outburst! I did not mean to cast any stones, first or
otherwise. I am as prone as anyone to the "temptation of certainty" as
Maturana and Varela call it in The Tree of Knowledge. I have witnessed too
many wars in my lifetime (literal and figurative) where each side was
utterly convinced of the rightness of their position and the utter
bankruptcy of the opposition view. I can't think of many instances where the
combatants suddenly realized the self evident correctness of the opposition
view. So if schools need re-formation, my guess is that we will need
something more akin to Gary's mysticism than a re-design or revolution. As a
child (well, OK, young adult) of the 60s I learned that many things can be
accomplished by living your beliefs rather than preaching them. So often we
seek the solution to perceived problems in a NEW method, a NEW curriculum, a
NEW model of schooling and to justify the NEW we have to discredit the old.
But if I understand Gary correctly, he is saying that the essence of
schooling lies in very humble but powerful forces of people (call them
teachers for now) thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to work with kids
(call them students for now) to foster their intellectual, emotional and,
even spiritual growth. Nothing we do should get in the way of that. Anything
that does get in the way is hereby FORBIDDEN! But all else is possible.
But, as Diane noted, this is easier offer from the comfort of the academy
than in the trenches of the public school classroom and elsewhere.
I will go and be alone with my sandwich now.........djc
-----Original Message-----
From: Gary D Shank [mailto:shank@duq.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 8:43 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: public opinion pohl
One of my favorite SF writers, Frederik Pohl, once wrote a short story
called "Three Portraits and a Prayer"
Stealing that model, lets consider --
Portrait #1 -- Don Cunningham
***************************************************************
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?
***************************************************************
Portrait #2 -- Jay Lemke
***************************************************************
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.
***************************************************************
Portrait #3 -- Diane Hodges
***************************************************************
really, idiosyncratic examples of where alternative schools "got it right"
don't influence the larger system.
we're dealing with a massive cultural consciousness,
not just an architecture or curriculum.
education today represents an economy of conscience and a history of
consciousness, a military agenda, a political literacy and investment:
"change" is - mostly - intolerable, because it requires a loss of what
has been, and what has been has served so much in terms of government and
bureaucracy (power/white men, etc, all those intolerables)
- not to mention the
"walked-five-miles-a-day-to-school-in-the-snow-barefoot" myth.
individual teachers might do radical teaching,
but that doesn't change the system. change likely takes place in lieu of
the system.
my first thought is: if you are going to keep doing what you have always
been doing, unless you can be offered some sort of "compelling example" of
something better, .. then
how do you learn to keep teaching? how do you learn to learn about your
students?
how do you learn if you know already what is required to change your mind?
have i missed your meaning?
on the structural scale,
everyone has a fantasy of the the ultimate bureaucracy, the utopian
education - an open-ended melange of personally-constructed curricula that
meets the diverse needs of the diverse histories, economies, cultures, and
so on, of people, but really. urban and rural schools have different
needs.
Pakistan and Argentina have different needs from Hong Kong and Oise
(Idaho).
Culture is the most dominant structure of any education - understanding
how this is distributed is the task of both bureaucracy and anarchy -
de/centralization, and the risks that go with that - how does any ruling
organization ensure an education that will be fair, if not with standards
and rules?
who decides what is fair? fair for whom? and if fairness is relative
how do people participate in a world governed by capitalist values?
it's a conundrum that engages religion, gender, politics, history, and
all.
the idea that "one" system might meet all needs is the myth of
functionalism - the truth is, we _don't_ know how to bring about change,
because everyone desires and values different kinds of change.
et voila: diversity .
interdisciplinary study.
diversify yourself, diversify your perspectives.
the answers lie in more complicated questions.
the only response i have ever heard to your question is, understandably
intolerable: every student teacher should be required to spend (at least)
one year in therapy (WHY do you want to be a teacher?)
that would, to me, be a start towards the kinds of change you indicate -
it requires an unpredictable cultural shift...
***************************************************************
and here is my 'prayer' --
nine years ago, I bought a brand-new mint hardcover copy of castaneda's
'the art of dreaming' and proceeded to throw it on the mental reading
pile. I just finished it last night. I've also been reading boethius and
cassidorus and hugh of st victor and martinus capella and john of
salisbury and st john cassian, attempting to understand what they had in
mind when they created the seven liberal arts. Speaking of the liberal
arts, who can forget ts eliot's observation that a liberal education frees
us from the tyranny of being born in a particular place and time?
All I can say about the portraits above is that modernist education has
protected itself from change by creating a seamless cloak of ordinariness
that it wears at all times. All cultures understand the need to be seen
as ordinary and default, but we have taken it to the next step. What is
that next step?
I have never had much use for the writings and ideas of john dewey, and
this has always puzzled me. What is so wrong with dewey that I cringe
from him? I finally know the answer -- he doesn't have one single
mystical bone in his body. It was this flaw, and not his good ideas, that
drew him to be the architect of modernist education. It is a small step
from doing to testing, if you strip doing of its mystical heart. No
culture has been as violently anti-mystical as ours. The only window we
have allowed for mysticism is some kind of kooky anti-intellectualism we
call 'new age.' Isaac newton wrote more about the prophecies of daniel
than he wrote about f = ma. Einstein was a mystic in his own way, and so
was peirce and feynmann and other architects of contemporary science that
our modernist culture holds up as icons of proper inquiry.
To finish my exploratory ramblings -- mysticism is not
anti-intellectualism, as the gatekeepers of modernist education would have
us believe. What happens when we realize that teaching is a vocation and
a calling, and learning is a fundamental part of our attempt to wrestle
with the stupendous mystery of creation? What happens when we set up
schools of teacher formation instead of teacher training? Modernist
religion is just as anti-mystical as any other part of modernist thought,
so I have no use for 'faith-based' anything so long as that faith is
modernist in nature. But what happens when we really and truly bring
together mystery and reason into the whole they truly form, each
respectful of the other?
This is my prayerI.
gary shank
shank@duq.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:02 PDT