cross-posted at The G Bitch Spot
Thanks, EJ!
We have yielded to the arrogance of “big business men” and have accepted their criteria of efficiency at their own valuation, without question. We have consented to measure the results of educational efforts in terms of price and product—the terms that prevail in the factory and the department store. But education, since it deals in the first place with human organisms, and in the second place with individualities, is not analogous to a standardizable manufacturing process. Education must measure its efficiency not in terms of so many promotions per dollar of expenditure, nor even in terms of so many student-hours per dollar of salary; it must measure its efficiency in terms of increased humanism, increased power to do, increased capacity to appreciate.
Written by a teacher in The American Teacher, 1912, quoted by Linda Darling-Hammond in a commencement ceremony for Columbia University’s Teachers College. She also said:
And while there is lots of talk of international test score comparisons, there is too little talk about what high-performing countries actually do: fund schools equitably; invest in high-quality preparation, mentoring and professional development for teachers and leaders, completely at government expense; organize a curriculum around problem-solving and critical-thinking skills; and test students rarely—and never with multiple-choice tests.(Indeed, the top-performing nations increasingly rely on school-based assessments of learning that include challenging projects, investigations and performances, much like what leading educators have created here in the many innovative New York public schools.)
Meanwhile, the profession of teaching and our system of public education are under siege from another wave of scientific managers, who have forgotten that education is about opening minds to inquiry and imagination, not stuffing them like so many dead turkeys—that teaching is about enabling students to make sense of their experience, to use knowledge for their own ends, and to learn to learn, rather than to spend their childhoods bubbling in Scantron sheets to feed the voracious data banks that govern ever more decisions from the bowels of the bureaucracy.
Discuss.
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Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Service of Democratic Education. The Nation.org. The Nation. 21 May 2011. Web. 28 May 2011.
The language is identical to what we are hearing at universities today. The push is toward more “practical” degrees, that is, degrees that are marketable, and away from degrees that foment basic skills. These are tough time because many fall into the trap of credentialism.
Like the efficiency experts then and the market-model experts focused on public schools now, it’s common for public education, and teachers–many of whom then and now are women and many of whom now are of color–to have outside experts who have no experience in a classroom and know little about what goes into teaching even a single lesson but are beyond certain they know what’s wrong with the system, and all too often these [male] experts want to get rid of [female] teachers who don’t immediately or happily go along with their flow.
The bias toward “practical” degrees is misleading and slightly delusional because nothing is as practical as English yet it is seen as the least useful of degrees and departments, especially by students or adults who had a bad teacher once or who never clicked with words. But you don’t see those of us who didn’t click with numbers trying to abolish math departments.
I’m sorry, what were we talking about?
I noted that the language in the original text you cited was 100 years old, and then we at the observations that the market-based model doesn’t work well for those who don’t have access to it. For example, students who need supplementary instruction because they come from homes that have books, parents with higher levels of education, time or ability to supervise their children because they work different hours. The market/efficiency system weebs these kids out.
We’re seeing the same thing at the college level, as higher education takes on business models. I agree with your comments about English majors.
Jimmy
Hi, G,
Just read this, “What saves us is efficiency–the devotion to efficiency.” It’s from Marlow in the Heart of Darkness.
Jimmy
Yeah, that tells you something, doesn’t it?