Dear McSpotlight et al.
I'm putting the education thread that used to be on the Cap & Alt list on the Kids Debating Room -- after all, we are talking about children, I do teach them, and there is a lot less traffic here... I hope no one is too put out by this...Well, last we heard, Barry Stoller pointed out that:
BS: I would like to add a caveat to your fifth point (school as building community and democracy). In our present society, the seemingly unfortunate practices of separating children from parents so parents can continue to labor (alienatedly), training children to be obedient wage-earners like their parents, and forcing children to accept and acquiesce to inegalitarian distributions of reinforcers is 'community' and 'democracy' under our current practices.
My response: An important essay toward understanding what kind of community is produced by schooling today is Kris Gutierrez et al., "Cultural tensions in the Scripted Classroom: The Value of the Subjugated Perspective" (Urban Education, 29(4)(1996), pp. 410-442). Gutierrez et al. argue that the instructional rituals of many of the lower-class classrooms (that can be observed today) are dictated by scripts (lesson plans, to be exact), and that within the tension of the (completely) scripted classroom there arises a counterscript. (Here I would distinguish between completely- and partially-scripted classrooms, although Gutierrez et al. don't.) To provide a definition: the (completely) scripted classroom is a classroom where the instructional rituals are preplanned by the teacher, where the lesson plan provides a totalizing description of the communication to be performed by all actors within the classroom, where the unplanned is regarded as chaotic, and where the only student-performed communication within such ritual (as encouraged by the teacher) is the scripted student response to questions asked by the teacher. Now, speak up kids, you've experienced the (completely) scripted classroom, haven't you?
The counterscript, to define another term, is the conversation that goes on between children when the teacher isn't listening, without the permission of the teacher. The counterscript, as described by Gutierrez et al., is related to Erving Goffman's concept of the "underlife." The underlife is defined as where members of an institution (such as a school) develop identities different from the ones the institution assigns them, and the counterscript is the communication between students symptomatic of such an underlife. So where do "community" and "democracy" stand with respect to the counterscript and the underlife of a classroom, of a school? The counterscript is the communication that builds the student community within the (completely) scripted classroom, and the underlife is the forum within which such community is publicized. So, if we judge public schooling by the commonality of the scripted classroom, we can argue that true community in the classroom is offered, despite, and not because of, the leadership of teachers.
In (completely) scripted classrooms, therefore, teachers typically use methods of "classroom management" that try to privatize the publicity generated by the underlife, further separating the underlife from official school culture. What do I mean here by "privatized publicity"?? For instance, one very popular plan (said by its main promoter to be presently used in half of all American classrooms) for classroom management is marketed under the name of "Lee Canter's Assertive Discipline," whcih offers a system of external incentives and disincentives to coerce "good behavior" (i.e. compliance) from students as defined by a set of rules to be enforced with machine-like accuracy by teachers. The main incentive to "behave well" as offered under Assertive Discipline is usually conceived as a privilege or commodity to be given to the student as a reward for good behavior, to be enjoyed privately, and the main disincentive of Assertive Discipline (as stated by Canter) involves putting the name of the punished child (punishment to vary within classrooms) so as to publicize punishment within the classroom. All of which serves to put a big "minus sign" upon the classroom as a public space, to valorize "private discussion" over "public discourse" within an educational public space. So my guess is that educational systems in the US do not, for the most part, serve the purposes of "democracy" or "community," since they serve to discourage public discourse within the developmental spaces of America's youth. Such youth might as well seek out McDonald's Playplace as a public space, if schools are not for community building, and in the worst schools, doubtless the Playplace is the better bet.
What's more, many of the reforms currently being trumpted by both major (American) parties have as their primary goal the retreat of educational systems from their role as creators of a public space. The dismantling of bilingual education (in California) will, for instance, require non-English speakers to achieve non-English literacy at home (as they already have to do in most cases), and voucher systems, charter schools, and other ways of commodifying the schooling business will allow students to receive an education only insofar as they can be marketed and sold to a school. And, most scarily, "ending social promotion," a faddish "reform," is just a recipe for failing that class of students that performs below a certain spot on the inevitable bell curve that results when their test scores are analyzed (and there will always be such a class, as any fool who knows what a bell curve is can tell you) See Richard Rothstein, "Where is Lake Wobegon, Anyway? The Controversy Surrounding Social Promotion," Phi Delta Kappan, November 1998, pp. 195-198, for more understanding. Thus without "social promotion," the schools will be allowed to purchase educational failure without hiding behind notions of "success for everyone". Consider in this regard my previous statement that most present-day school reform is going in the wrong direction.
Unfortunately, public schools in lower-class neighborhoods often represent the most prominent community-building efforts going on in such neighborhoods. Schools, most importantly, provide breakfast and lunch to the children of the lower classes. The point about "conservative" school reform is that the schools are to be disempowered as community-building associations. The lower classes are, according to such reform, to build communities by themselves, in private, and despite the police who conduct regular drug busts in such neighborhoods, carting away prominent community members to prison. And if any teacher in a lower-class neighborhood dare hope to build community or to do anything more than earn a paycheck (to be made as meager as possible after the teacher unions are smashed, in the Republican version of this "reform") while focusing on a set of failing standardized test scores, the conservatives will empower the hierarchy to do anything and everything to get in the way of such community-building efforts. Right-wing school reformers would like the lower classes to be destined for prisons, not schools, and such reformers feel the need for cheap labor to sweep their floors, they will hire Mexicans, and deport them when they're no longer needed. How convenient.
BS: What I am saying is that I do not think that community an' democracy can be 'taught’ in our present culture in order to change our present culture. I think that the culture must change and then other standards of community or democracy will be relevant and, thus, can be readily taught.
SDF: Precisely what will change a culture if it isn't education? And how will a culture change if its educators are all pressed into a status-quo mold? The mass media changes people, but this is done primarily in a consmueristic way -- Hollywood puts out product, the people buy or don't buy, and the process goes on. Teachers, real teachers, on the other hand, try to change culture by initiating problem-solving dialogues. Is there another mainstream social role that does this?
BS: We actually agree on many points. Perhaps the main difference in our views is, as I see it, you have a bit more of a reform attitude whereas I have more of a communitarian approach.
SDF: If it appears that I am interested in "reform," this is because I am a public-school teacher, and as a public school teacher I must start by persuading my colleagues in the public school system that their ideals of teaching would be best represented by my approached to the political issues of educational reform, than they would if they attached their ideals to the status quo approach commonly argued by representatives of teacher unions, or to the various armchair politicses commonly circulating within the pages of the Phi Delta Kappan magazine.
Within American society as a whole, individuals do not usually choose to teach because they want to create new communities in America out of whole cloth; they choose to teach because they like children, or because they need the money and are (just) capable enough to do the instructional "job" and motivated enough to pursue the credential process to completion despite the bureaucratic hassle of administrative schooling. Other idealists of schooling, however, are more interested in political issues of education, but they work as political or educational lobbyists of one type or another, because their immediate concerns revolve around the fates of children as they exist now, today. Nearly all such participants in school reform confront an educational reality dominated by public schooling and by publicly-subsidized higher education, that is becoming more and more globalized at present anyway. So, given these contingencies, that is the audience I attempt to sway with my rhetoric; and at this point I don't know of a more appropriate audience with which to discuss educational issues. At least such an audience can persuade teachers that the community-building thing is worth the bother.
Now such an audience of school reformers may be interested in reforming the system, or in creating a new system from whole cloth (starting all over again), or it may be interested in doing nothing for now. I think it would be best for me to assume that my audience is making up its collective mind in its own way, rather than merely to argue that I know what's best for the world while appearing to be inconsiderate. So I want to argue gently, as one who merely cautions his audience to beware the pitfalls of sloppy thinking before running off half-cocked with school reform and educational politics.
None.
