Wow! I take a day off to snowboard with my family at the ski area down the road, and Miguel goes nuclear, getting quite deep into some complex thinking. Sometimes I think I could make a part time job out of simply responding to what he has to say. What would happen if we ever found ourselves in the same room? I get a lot to think about from reading his blog, but I don’t write as fast as he does.
Sincerely, I think that exploring the power relations embedded in language is a provocative line of thinking that holds promise for latching onto truth, which seems to be a difficult thing to pin down anymore. I wrote a while back about evaluating truth claims because I find Carspecken’s analytical frame for understanding the validity requirements of different types of claims useful when I’m exploring new ideas, trying to sort the B from the S, to be polite. Principally, mistaking normative claims for objective claims seems to me to be a fundamental point of difficulty for people.
In a quote from Borderland that Miguel used to illustrate a point, I wrote that
The balance between responsibility and the need students have to take a risk is real, but it’s not a static limit….
In his post, Miguel rephrased the statement as
The limits students work within are not absolute and they shift and move with each individual. Good and evil are absolute, aren’t they?
Maybe I’m missing something here, but the links to pages discussing moral relativism/absolutism don’t apply to my intended meaning. My intention with the word ‘responsibility’ was to reference the teacher’s responsibility to maintain a safe learning environment, while my use of the words ‘need to take a risk’ is an assumption that I make about our need to learn from our experiences. Think about the type of playground equipment we provide at school. It’s swings and slides – not trampolines and tightropes. I was trying to say that each kid has different capacities for understanding the world, coming to us as they do with a wide variety of life experiences and family values. And furthermore, these capacities vary with the age and temperament of each student, so the limits we must observe are not static.
Perhaps the relativism/absolutism moral spin was the meaning that Miguel made from my statement which, indeed, would say something about his own frame of reference with respect to authority and freedom. The claim that “good and evil are absolute” is a normative claim, and would require a great deal of conversation about many other things before we’d ever reach agreement on that simple statement.
I am one hundred percent in agreement about the value of challenging our own assumptions about power, and our use of language to impose those beliefs on others, particularly children. Miguel’s use of the metaphor of the “strong father” for an authoritarian symbol interests me in this discussion. As an exercise of thought, consider how the meaning would change if he used the term “big brother” instead. Orwell chose that Big Brother symbol carefully, I think, because he recognized how easily power could be imposed on people who believed it was being applied for their own good, and big brothers are typically viewed as caretakers, while strong fathers are stereotyped as disciplinarians. In our current political climate, and more and more throughout western society, safety is emphasized as a value that trumps respect and freedom of choice. Power that is exercised in the name of security has very disturbing implications, in my view.
Teachers are being asked to serve a monster. NCLB is a mechanism to enslave us and our students to definitions of competence that are outright fabrications. The entire issue is based on lies, justified by a claim that attempts to link economic well-being and national security, and will indeed destroy public education if we don’t figure out how to reframe the discussion. We need to actively define an alternative vision from the one that is being legislatively promoted. I do see a ray of hope in this dark cloud. If teachers ever manage to summon the will to begin working on the legitimate weaknesses and failures of the system we toil within – weaknesses that we ourselves identify – we might begin to reframe this discussion from one of educational reform to one that is focused on changes that will matter. The power to control definitions is the power to control thought. However, as I mentioned in my previous post, we lack consensus. Consensus has been managed for us by administrators.
Normative claims that masquerade as objective truth are tools of propaganda. Fear and lies serve devious ends. Do not allow people to use terms like achievement gap, failure, or proficiency without challenging their meaning. The problem isn’t simply “failing” schools. Schools are being asked to clean up a broadly distributed social mess caused by centuries of materialism and greed. Education has been colonized. We are being trampled by our rescuers. This is not a new story.
4 Comments
I really appreciated your post. It’s so easy to get sucked into a game where the debate is over signs without a referent, terms like “achievement gap, failure, or proficiency.” I know I do it. Reminders like this are necessary and (hopefully) can raise the level of conversation about education.
I just discoverd your blog through your comments on mine and have really been enjoying your thoughts. It’s nice to find someone else who seems to be practicing and preaching critical pedagogy.
Stephen, I find your mention of “signs without a referent” to be a nice way for me to stay alert to messages that play in the background all the time. Thanks.
Oh lord.
The phrase you use to describe education today: weaknesses that we ourselves identify, is so apt. In addition to our need to adhere to NCLB, to surpass AYP, and to work our damndest to get our students to reach “proficient” or “advanced,” we teachers buy into what’s “necessary.”
We allow our administration to tell us: “You may no longer teach the standards we require you to teach. You must only teach toward the state test.” After a time, we begin to think that teaching toward the test is the true and right path.
I’ve “fallen” from my group of teachers lately as I’ve refused to teach toward this test, because I see it as taking away form teaching. Often, these tests have little to do with what happens in class.
Apparently, it’s still an important lesson to be taught to the students. The students, in turn, begin to repeat phrases we’ve taught them. They know the followng:
basic
proficient
advanced
ayp
RIT
etc.
But they don’t know what any of these terms mean. And they shouldn’t as these are terms meant for administration. The kids should be kept as far away from these terms as possible.
In teaching the terms to our students, we buy more into the idea that these tests are a capable measurement of their abilities. (And I’d hate to accept a computer’s judgement of my students.)
Your validation of my own strong feelings suggests that we are looking at the situation similarly. I’m always the one at staff meetings to speak up about these issues. As long as I don’t do it too often, people seem to enjoy my nagging questions. I think everyone feels oppressed, which is a great catalyst for building a resistance. We should think about sharing with students a little bit more of the picture so that the tests are not viewed with fear, but rather, perhaps, with skepticism. It’s their world too. They can start thinking about the direction it’s moving.
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