Ok, Diane retracted her puke (not necessary, wouldn't ask that of ANYONE
! :) ... but still she makes an important point, or cluster of points, of
the sort I'm inclined to make myself on darker days ... which I have.
Demonstrating that really valuable kinds of education can and do happen
does NOT, I agree, act in itself to change the educational system. But it
is a counter-force to the growing victory of simple-mindedness about
standards and assessment, which is really making things EVEN WORSE (less
time for real teaching, more time for test preparation ... words from
nearly all teachers reporting on what's actually happening in US systemic
'reform' of education) AND deflecting a growing social demand for
educational improvement by offering a false solution. Necessary but not
sufficient.
Legitimating the task of building a science of the particular for
education, one that rejects old-physics-like notions of 'best practice'
one-size-fits-all and instead tries to build a rational-and-passionate,
i.e. a humane science and technology that insists on the real value of
difference and uniqueness, not just in individuals, but at all scales of
institutions ... and so undermines the rationale for large-scale
uniformity, centralization, and central accumulation of power over
resources and people ... also I think necessary, not sufficient, but useful
as a tool regardless of whether in itself it changes things in the large
scale or not.
OK, as a doctoral student you tried good things and discovered the amazing
number of reasons/passions why people won't go along with them ... reasons
born of larger-scale patterns (economic, cultural, classed, gendered, etc.)
that no one of us CAN interact with, much less change. I don't expect MUCH
better luck as head of a doctoral program in a world urban center, with the
support of many colleagues, in dialogue with some of the current power
brokers in our local ecosystem ... but something progressive COULD happen
here ... there are sea-changes in educational attitudes and approaches, and
a lot of stakeholders are getting rather desperate.
You want my honest appraisal of the chances of reform-from-within of the US
educational system? Zero. With confidence. What is the most likely road for
change? re-engineering .... finding entirely different institutions that
can do the job that needs to be done ... which can co-exist with the
present system, and which time can tell if they will turn out to have been
the precursors of whatever is the successor social technology to schooling.
But as they say in politics, you can't beat someone with no one. Do you get
compromised by operating anywhere close to the center of the system? Well,
WE don't have to get compromised, though the institutional forms we develop
often will be ... but there can be a lot of them, compromised and not
compromised to different degrees and in different ways. Can we reach a
point of punctuated equilibrium when this rather dreary gradualism suddenly
produces the Big Change? yes, it will happen, and we can't know how and we
can't control how or when. Do we also need more extreme radical positions
to extend the space of possibilities and critiques and force a little
healthy confrontation, absolutely. They also serve who only scream and
puke! And mirror, and deny, and refuse, and confront, and create something
really different.
And I say all this within my currently evolving notion of where we might be
getting to in terms of Big Change, not just in education, but in
post-institutional society (or trans-institutional meta-society) ... which
may just be an experiment for the privileged, but could also be a new phase
in the development of human social technologies that will become as
widespread in time as modernism has.
It is an interesting theoretical question whether radical change can/can't
arise from the innovations of the privileged vs. from the creativity of the
marginalized vs. from the grass roots of the masses. I don't believe it
originates ANYWHERE. All these factors are in play, and what emerges does
not come from just one of them, but from new, unpredictable alignments
among them. So there is progressive work to be done on all these fronts ...
innovating with the resources of privilege, writing as a radical sexual
outlaw-poet revolutionary, participating in the emergence from the lives of
ordinary and oppressed people of their own consciousness and perspectives
and desires and ways of doing. And special work to be done connecting these
with one another, in a life, in a partnership, in a fellowship, in a
confrontation, in the traversals across institutions and borders, in
transgressions .....
I'm good at rhetoric, for some listeners. We work with what we have, while
we discover what we're getting next ....
JAY.
At 12:12 AM 8/8/2001 -0600, you wrote:
>Jay, ever-safe, sez,
> >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.
>
>omigawd. i PUKE on your rhetoric. no offense. you are a dear, but you
>speak from specific privilege, and as a doctoral student, i tried - i
>tried to influence people, i tried to invent contexts of change,
>i tried to write the value of diversity, and for what?
>CRAP. NADA.
>
>face it, ::: participating WITH the bureaucracy gives you the authority to
>phrase a cautious critique - but for those of us rebels who have never
>succeeded in conforming ,hell. we're nothing more than decoration.
> >
> >
> >I am also not arguing for a totally individualistic approach to
> >education.
> >The value of uniqueness is in its unique contribution to collaborative
> >partnerships.
>
>rhetoric. UGH. specify.
>when everyone around you is a satisfied piece of the machine,
>how do you cultivate a community of collaboration? with whom? all the
>other non-persons? in the end, DUDE, anyone who wants a job turns into the
>person that is going to be hired. the end. until the institution can value
>difference, nothing will change.
>
> >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.
>
>you know, i think the world of you, Jay-ster,
>but this is all reaks of platitude and privilege.
>
>the truth is... well.
>
>who knows.
>change is death.
>
>what are you willing to give up for change?
>
>
>diane
>p.s. seriously, WHO is offering 15million for a teacher ed reform?????
>
>
>
>
>"I want you to put the crayon back in my brain."
>Homer Simpson
>
>diane celia hodges
>university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
>instruction
>vancouver, bc
>mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2
---------------------------
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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