This reader, a lawyer in Mine, asks important, thoughtful questions that go to the heart of the current debate over the future of education–from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. Is technology now promoting the demand for objective, measurable means and ends? Is the technological culture at odds with the humane goals of the Western intellectual tradition? Do we treasure only what can be measured? Or do we recognize that what we treasure most can seldom be quantified, unless it is money? Should we give up and let the corporate reformers place us and our children into “the market”? Or do we resist and fight for the value of every child, for the value of deep and reflective learning, and for the principles of democracy?
He writes:
I recently finished reading two books, Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, both of which are rather depressing for those of us who seek intellectual quality in education.
According to both authors, we have moved into a technological culture that is driven by the unstoppable quest “efficiency” and the unwavering belief that a technique (including both methods of action and specific devices) exists that will provide “maximum efficiency” for any task. Modern, so-called “neo-classical”, economic theory is based on this very idea. (Although I agree with Noam Chomsky that “neo-classical” is neither new nor classical.) Not surprisingly then, the dogmas of neo-classcial economists are treated like the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation. As Ellul notes, the problem is a sociological and cultural one, one that we cannot simply “correct” by modifying our attitudes or values. Only a radical change in society can really change our culture.
So, when I look at the reformers, I have begun to see that they are the champions of the technological culture (technopoly) and are applying the values and tenets of that culture to our schools. (Which, as T.S. Elliot once remarked, are the repositories of our culture.) Since neo-classcial dogma teaches the rational inerrancy of the “the market” in determining the most efficient practices, then schools must be privatized. The market needs “objective measures” of school, teacher, and student performance. Since computers can manipulate data in an “objective” way, then we must structure our schools to function in accordance with computer-based evaluations of schools, students, and teachers. To do anything else is, by definition, irrational.
To defeat this, we must start to offer a different vision. A vision that puts humans and human development ahead of “efficiency” and “rationality”. That’s a tall order. For me, it requires returning to the basic values of the Western intellectual tradition, since our current cultural monster arose from the abuses of modern thought that displaced the ideas of the Enlightenment after the Industrial Revolution. I think we can do this, but it will a long, hard road.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In a world where there many people have too little to eat and where our over exploitation of the natural world threatens the lives of many I would think that efficiently using resources would be a high priority. Inefficiency, or perhaps a better term would be wasting resources, is a luxury only the wealthy can afford.
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The problem is not lack of efficiency in the production of food, but politics and ideologies in distributing the food to those that need it. As history has shown, the ultimate efficiency is slavery and exploitation.
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It is difficult to separate the production of things from the distribution of things. China had a great deal of trouble feeding itself because farmers saw little incentive to increase yields due to the way food was distributed (and farmers compensated). Change the way food is distributed (and land tenure rights) so individual interests and social interests are aligned and much more food is produced.
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Great point MathVale!
TE, Does China pay farmers to not grow crops, as we do?
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The problem in China was largely that no one paid Chinese farmers to grow crops.
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It’s questionable how efficent slavery actually is. The Soviet Union disposed of vast quantities of slave labor in the Gulag but little of lasting economic value was produced. The economy of the Soviet Union might well have achieved greater growth if a lot fewer people had been sent to the Gulag and instead allowed to work as they wished.
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Unless the ultimate goal was to work slaves to death, as with the Nazis, maybe the Soviets could have learned something about efficiency from capitalist US Southerners who aimed to keep their slaves alive.
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For TeachingE, “It is difficult to separate the production of things from the distribution of things.” Children are not things, that is the point being made.
Also, other countries are doing a better job of creating and distributing wealth than the US: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/upshot/the-american-middle-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html?_r=0#
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Never said children were things.
I was thinking back to attempts at agricultural collectivization.
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excellent point Math Vale “As history has shown, the ultimate efficiency is slavery and exploitation.”
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Southern slave-owners aimed to keep slaves alive? That’s a good one.
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In the South, slaves were purchased and valued as property, servants and a workforce important for keeping plantations running. Slave owners didn’t generally aim to kill off such investments, since they’d just have to pay out more money to buy replacements.
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I shouldn’t be surprised that there are open apologists for slavery posting here in support of education “reform”, high stakes testing, and the “common core”. But I confess I am a little shocked. Here is James C. Cobb on Life Expectancy under slavery in “The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 22.
underhttp://books.google.com/books?id=WF3hl9UAODAC&q=life+expectancy#v=snippet&q=life%20expectancy&f=false
How prescient Professor Cobb was when he noted the trend for the entire country to be turning into a slave region like the Mississippi Delta, ruled by greedy, money-obsessed absentee landlords and a complete disregard for social values.
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Life was brutal for slaves and it’s our country’s greatest shame. Personally, I think they should have been granted restitution. They lived awful lives and many died horrendous deaths, but the aim of slave owners was exploitation, not killing off their workforce.
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Destroying education by the use of so-called “efficient” teaching methods doesn’t seem very efficient to me.
Your statement just begs the question. You assume that what we have, and what the reformers want, is a truly efficient use of resources. It isn’t, since it fails to accomplish the task of education.
In fact, wasting time, effort, and money chasing reforms that are really about making the rich more rich and dooming all but a few children to menial jobs and intellectual stagnancy doesn’t seem like an efficient use of resources at all. It’s far more efficient to have a real middle class than it is to have a few who own everything and billions who are starving.
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If the blog entry was critical of inefficient uses of resources perhaps it would be better to say critical things about inefficiency rather than efficiency.
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Teaching, we’ve been essentially arguing, just as I pointed out, that insipid and self-serving “reforms” are inefficient by wasting everyones’ time and money. What more do you need? 🙂
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This post seems to be making a much much broader point about culture and society. I have to say though that the post is very mistaken when it says neoclassical economics “teaches the rational inerrancy of the “the market”. I have spent this semester, as I do nearly every spring semester, teaching a class about market failure. Market failure is a standard topic in neoclassical economics, indeed firms exist because of market failures.
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I think the post is trying to put our current educational mess in a broader social context.
As for “efficiency”, while I’m glad you make an effort to teach market failure, that doesn’t answer the point. “Market failure”, as you point out, is a standard topic because neo-classical economists agree that failures are a part of life. But that’s beside the point of the post. Most neo-classical economists I’ve read—and that’s quite a few—argue that “market forces” will alway produce the most efficient distribution of goods and services. That includes occasional (and supposedly unpredictable) “market failures”, as I recall “Nobel” Laureate Gene Fama explained to Queen Elizabeth back in 2008, (“Nobel” in quotes, because Alfred Nobel never provided for an award in economics; that was trussed up by the Swedish central bank in 1969 for Milton Friedman.)
So, try reading Yves Smith’s Econned or Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics; even better, read Joan Robinson’s works along with Ellul. You’ll see a wider and truly more sane world.
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So when the post spoke of neoclassical economics teaching the “inerrancy of the market” what it actually meant was that neoclassical economics does NOT teach about the inerrancy of the market?
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I’m not defending neo-classical economics. But I would think that you of all people on this board would be aware of the Arrow-Debreu theorem and Fama’s comments on the unavoidable and unpredictable market “corrections”. The first states that markets will find a global economic optimum; the second states there will be hiccups on the way. Nevertheless, “in the long run” the optimum is expected to be found, so long as you let “the market” rule.
Frankly, I see nothing contradictory about those statements per se. The underlying logic of each statement has been shown by logic and reason to be nonsensical. But it’s always the irrational people who think they’re most rational.
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Most “menial” jobs” will be going the way of “technological efficiency”. Maintenance and cleaning work, transportation, waiters/servers, a sizable amount of informational and customer support services, reception work are headed for robotized labor. Our current trajectory is such that unless a human being is “properly functional” and compliant, he or she will have his/her labor outsourced to technology.
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Blind faith, you said a lot there. The theory, of course, is that when you replace all those telephone operators with automated “customer self-service portals,” all those cashiers with auotmated checkouts, all those assembly line workers with robots, productivity and therefore general wealth will increase and those workers will turn to newer, more innovative, more creative, and thus more valuable uses of their energies. But what we have seen is VAST increases in productivity combined with vastly increased wealth and income inequality and vastly increasing long-term unemployment.
Of course, it’s no surprise that the oligarchy has suddenly discovered the religion of “grit.” Those low-level service workers have to be trained to persevere in their menial jobs no matter how alienated they are a) from their coworkers, b) from the fruits of their labors, c) from the task at hand, d) from their own wishes and dreams.
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James Kunstler is not an economist and is a bit of a nutter, but he once wrote two paragraphs I liked so much that I keep them on hand to cut and paste in situations like this comment thread:
On the other hand, it’s true that in the long run we’re all dead, and for a lot of people, life on the straightest path to collective hell is a big improvement on the present.
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And of course, the process Kunstler describes is arguably inefficient. Like I said, he’s not an economist.
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I see why you love that quotation, Flerp. I do, too.
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So what is efficiency? The efficiency in learning that is defined and promoted in education through technology and quantified (and manipulated) data is fake (or shallow at best). Not only is this type of efficiency fake/narrow in its definition of learning, it promotes a sorting and ranking that sacrifices authentic learning-the innate love of learning about self, others and the diverse world. It also sacrifices a healthy, vibrant, diverse collaborative and balanced learning community in which an appreciation and respect for each and everyone’s aha moments are celebrated rather than judged, sorted and ranked! Teach kinders and first graders and sadly observe efficient learning defined and driven by quantifiable data. It only works for robots…
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YES!
The psychology of the “correct answer” amongst children who have not yet passed through the formative developmental stages (separating from the parent) for will create an entirely different social realm in the future. The mistaken belief that the ability to navigate information efficiently is akin to learning or even intelligence will pervade.
These two states of mind merged will, I believe, be the greatest deterrent to vibrancy, collaboration, self and mutual respect in the classroom and eventually in the work place. It will proliferate the worker-as-drone-type jobs that are the very foundation of the cult of the CEO. The local presence of this cult are seen as obelisks in the socio-economic landscape, where workers make 1/1,000the salary of their Napoleonic hero-CEO.
The well-being, work-life balance, job satisfaction, sustainability, or professional development opportunities of these worker/stakeholders will not be accounted for in the quantified analysis of their “performance” or “ranking” as written neatly in the annual report of the shareholders. The worker bees themselves are the data they learned to master as children, and serve at the same time.
But they will have their personal technology and will retreat to it, night after night: screens, ear buds, glass, etc. and take comfort that they can, with the most bird’s eye of views, be informed digitally about the international expanse, their community, and efficiently file away the responsive thoughts and emotions that surface, as efficiently as they navigated the information. They are a witness to the world behind the security of the hardware, an electronic force-field, if you will. The only price for this perceived safety is that they are being watched and tracked all the while.
This rational dystopia already exists and is priming its subscribers younger and to the point of saturation, billed as what “good parents” provide for their children. Fortunately, there is enough wisdom and courage in our human race to vocally question this ideal.
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Here’s the most efficient thing that we can do regarding food:
We can stop eating meat, for when we eat meat, we are throwing away 90 percent of the calories that went into its production, and we are wasting 70 percent of the agricultural land, which is in turn about 70 percent of all land used by humans.
I am in the process of completing a book in which I crunch all these numbers. The consequences of this waste are really breathtaking.
Eating meat is rather like leaving the tap running 24/7 so that you can wash your hands a couple times a day.
And, of course, it takes 1,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef (far, far more than for crops), and according to Lifestock’s Long Shadow, animal agriculture creates more greenhouse gases that all non-agriculture-related transportation (cars, trucks, trains, airplanes) combined.
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Huge, huge point, Bob. I’ve been a high-metabolism guy my whole life, and I’ve relied on meat like a kind of super-fuel. Now and then I try to cut back, but I’ve always failed. I’ll try again. We are a truly upsetting species.
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Every vegan I know, FLERP, is extraordinarily healthy, and many are athletes. We great apes are made for plant-based diets, and it’s only in a few places, mostly in the West, and mostly recently, that we’ve consumed a lot of meat, and with that comes enormous health problems–all the diseases of affluence–heart disease, cancers, diabetes. I’ve been vegan for about ten years now. Never felt better.
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The environmental costs of meat eating are enormous. EVERYTHING ELSE that humans do–all the destructive crap–PALES by comparison. Again, in my book, which is just about finished, I go into enormous detail about this–into more detail than has yet, I think, appeared in print. And none of that destruction is necessary.
One little fact.:
Since 1975, 31 percent of all wild vertebrates on planet Earth have disappeared through loss of habitat. That’s from the 2010 report of the UN Council on Biodiversity.
And almost all that habitat loss is traceable to meat eating–to appropriation of land for growing feed crops.
Well, two more:
Everyone’s worried about the population problem. There are 7 billion of us on the planet. But few understand that there are 68 billion farmed animals. (I just did this calculation, myself, based on 2011 FAO stats.)
And humans are taking between about a trillion and a half fish from the oceans each year. At this rate, ALL commercially fished species will be in collapse by 2040.
All of that is completely unnecessary.
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Bob,
Humans evolved as omnivores. Read, oh I don’t know, the thousands of research papers showing this.
The cost of producing meat is a separate issue, and if you are a vegetarian, good for you. But your personal preferences don’t overwrite human biology.
And please don’t respond with thirty different comments that run in circles.
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LOL. Inaccurate, Matt. But I will let you read my book, which treats these arguments in detail. We evolved as opportunistic herbivores–ones who would occasionally supplement a primarily plant-based diet. There is an enormous amount of research on this, mostly fairly recent.
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I’ll just make two quick points, but I am not going to get into a big discussion of this in this forum. Human digestive systems are virtually indistinguishable from those of our closest cousins among the other great apes, the Greater Chimps and the Bonobos, and only 3-5 percent of their diets come from animal sources (mostly grubs and adult insects). Studies of modern hunter gatherers like the Hadza show that even with modern weapons in places with lots of protected game, they expend more energy on a hunt than they get from it). The whole “man the huntere” thing has been dramatically overstated. And fire not only made meat more available but also made a vastly greater range of plant foods available, so the usual narrative there is wrong, too. There is a correction going on right now in the anthropological literature about this, and I have done a lot of research into the new thinking on this issue.
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Most humans in most places at most times didn’t eat much meat; it was too costly (by whatever means you measure cost, such as in kilocalories). And most were, historically, lactose intolerant and didn’t consume dairy.
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cx: 3-5 percent . . . comes, of course
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Bob,
Only 4 different comments, you can do better than that.
I’ll pass on your book and stick to reading actual published research such as: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20420525
Yes, this is not the place for this discussion. Not worth it either as you seem immune to both research and reason.
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Matt, did you actually read the Lucas et al. article?
It says of early hominins, “”The adoption of large-scale meat-eating may have necessitated advanced processing techniques such as cooking in part because raw meat is difficult and slow to chew, thus limiting consumption in large quantities.”
Then it says of Homo erectus, “Whether meat or starch-rich USOs [underground storage organs such as bulbs and corms] were the most critical high-energy food source in this scenario is the subject of vigorous debates. This debate may not be resolved soon because evidence of human-controlled fire and the sticks presumably used to dig up tubers do not preserve well in the archaeological and fossil records.” It mentions a controversial (and I think largely disproved) hypothesis that humans then went through a major meat-eating phase where meat reached 35 percent of the diet before returning to a primarily plant-based diet during the Neolithic revolution.
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Bob,
“it takes 1,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef ”
That figure doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
An average beef cow weighs around 1500 lbs roughly yielding 500lbs of boneless meat. That would mean to raise one cow through the slaughter process it would take around 3/4 million gallons of water.
The average US household uses around 300 gallons per day = 109500/year.
How did Lifestock’s Long Shadow come up with 1500?
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“Since 1975, 31 percent of all wild vertebrates on planet Earth have disappeared through loss of habitat.”
Another claim that doesn’t pass the smell test. Do you have a source for that claim?
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Here’s the exact quotation, Duane:
“The population of wild vertebrate species fell by
an average of nearly one- third (31%) globally between
1970 and 2006, with the decline especially
severe in the tropics (59%) and in freshwater ecosystems (41%). Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2010) Global Biodiversity Outlook 3. Montréal. P. 24.
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And here, Duane, is the entire UN report, so you can look it up yourself:
http://www.cbd.int/gbo3/
p. 24
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And the Inuit as an example of hunter gathering society. What was its meat to vegetable matter ratio?
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Duane, I gave the source for the 31 percent figure. It’s from the 2010 report of the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity. The water figure is from another U.N. report. I will have to look it up. But it’s accurate. It includes all the water that goes into irrigation of all the crops that the cow eats.
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Of course the Inuit didn’t eat much in the way of plant foods, Duane. We’re talking about averages, here, across human populations, not about adaptations to unique niche environments.
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Duane, I am not at the computer where I have the UN report on water use. National Geographic gives this figure online:
338 gallons of water to produce just 3 ounces of beef
Which would be 1,802.67 gallons for 16 ounces, or 1 pound.
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Bob,
What I am getting at is that more likely than not much of that water that is used comes naturally out of the sky and would fall no matter if there were humans, cattle, etc. . . . The figure as it is stated seems to me to be a bit exagerated in that since most get their water from a faucet (myself included, except that it is from a well and not a city source) that most would think that the water usage figure would not be of a “natural” source-even though it is not stated as such.
Be that as it may, that still sounds outlandishly high 3/4 of a million gallons per year per cow. No way. I would need to see the exact parameters and figures used to begin to give it credence. Somehow I doubt I would be convinced that the figure is accurate and it seems to me to be one of those “scare em” numbers. Then what do I know, I’m just an old fart high school Spanish teacher but I would bet that if I asked an ag extension person about that water figure they’d let out a big guffaw and tell me to stick to teaching Spanish.
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If the ag person reacted in that way, Duane, it would be because he or she had not thought it through carefully enough to include all the water that it takes or that he or she was not familiar with the relevant literature. I’ve spent the last four years, off and on, researching my book on veganism and have a lot of this material ready to hand. And in doing that work, one of the issues that I tried to overcome is that there is so much misinformation, so I dug pretty deeply for my sources. And in some cases, as for the figure on farmed animal populations, I did the number crunching myself from raw data tables from the FAO.
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It is outlandishly high. And that is the point. This stuff is highly, highly subsidized, Duane. Otherwise, the price of a steak would be astronomical. Feed crops are highly subsidized. It’s a trick our government learned from ancient Rome. When the ships stopped coming down the Tiber with the grain for the daily bread ration, that was the beginning of the end for the Empire.
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And the wild vertebrate collapse doesn’t surprise me at all because I was familiar with a lot of the figures on specific populations. The Bathurst caribou herd, for example, has declined from around 350,000 in the mid 1990s to 35,000 today. So, only 10 percent of what it was 20 years ago.
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Duane, in the mid 1900s, during the annual passenger pigeon migrations, there were so many–an estimated population of 2 to 3 billion–that they would blacken the sky for three days as they passed over. In 1914, the last one, named Lucy, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. They were hunted to extinction in a few decades’ time.
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This is from Christina Catanese of the EPA:
“Estimates are that a 1/3 pound burger requires 660 gallons of water to be produced, most of which is for the beef. One pound of beef requires 1,799 gallons”
So, a bit higher than the figure I have. Catanese says that her figures come from the Water Foodprint Network. http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/AboutWFN
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LOL. This must be the challenge Bob Shepherd’s posts day. I do wonder why, if people are going to question the accuracy of a statement I have made, they do it so rudely: “you seem immune to both research and reason”; “doesn’t pass the smell test.”
I, like other Homo ignorans, am fully capable of error. I wrote a big book on this subject called Uncertainty. But generally I don’t post stats unless I have them pretty close to hand from reputable sources.
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People like their meat.
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They sure do. I can’t begin to tell you, FLERP, how many times I have had someone, red-faced as a radish, SCREAM at me, “You vegans are such extremists!”
All I am saying is give Peas a chance. 🙂
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I also love how some of these people jump on, say something totally outrageous, and then say, but don’t respond, as in:
You’re a total idiot, but don’t respond to this!
That’s probably, come to think of it, good advice. I am reminded of a cartoon I saw once. A woman is standing impatiently in an interior doorway in a nightgown. Her fellow, sitting at a desk, is saying, “Can’t you see I’m busy here? There’s someone who is wrong on the Internet.”
LOL.
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Going back to Matt Metzger’s comments about my being “impervious to research and to reason,” some research:
Anthropologists James O’Connell, Kristen Hawkes, and Nicholas Blurton Jones point out that it is unknown whether the nonhuman animals bones found in the African Homo erectus sites were from scavenging or hunting. They also point out that among modern hunter-gathers like the Tanzanian Hadza, “men armed with bows and poisoned arrows operating in a game-rich savanna woodland habitat succeed in acquiring large animal prey at an annual average of only one every thirty hunter-days. Weeks may pass between kills, even in bands with several active hunters. Clearly, this is not an effective tactic for feeding small children.” It is therefore reasonable to conclude, they argue, that Homo erectus “did not do even as well as the Hadza, primarily because they lacked the projectile weapons that allow the Hadza to be as good as they are at both hunting and confrontational scavenging.” [“Chapter 5 Meat-Eating, Grandmothering, and the Evolution of Early Human Diets,” Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution, ed. Peter S. Ungar andMark F. Teaford (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2002) 51.]
In place of the traditional “Man the Hunter” view, O’Connell, Hawkes, and Blurton propose what they call the “Grandmother Hypothesis”: Young children can forage, and so can women. A foraging mother or grandmother can supply by this means, in sharp distinction to what is supplied by hunting males, more than enough food for her AND her children. Historically, average longevity of humans has been low, but primarily because of death in childhood. A Homo erectus female who survived past child-bearing age could live to a relatively old age and, once past her child-bearing prime could still contribute to the social group via her foraging. In fact, long-lived grandmothers inclined to forage for the benefit of her kin, in such a situation, would be selected for by evolution, for children and grandchildren carrying her genes would be more likely to survive to reproduce. And, of course, it needn’t have been, and probably wasn’t, just children and mothers and grandmothers who foraged. Most likely, as among most hunter gatherers today, foraging was a communal affair undertaken by persons of both genders.
Anthropologist Peter S. Rodman sums up the evolutionary evidence regarding our earliest ancestors’ diet as follows:
“Apes eat plants. Despite other incidental foods, the diets of great apes are comprised mainly of plant parts. They rarely eat other things, such as insects and meat, compared to the daily, even hourly, fare of plant parts. Chimpanzees, which by some analyses have a close phylogenetic relationship to humans (Ruvolo, 1997), hunt vertebrate prey and consume large numbers of social insects from time to time. These dietary items are very exciting, both to the chimpanzees and to the humans who watch them. They vary in presence and quantity from population to population, as well as from season to season within a population, however, and are not staples or significant components of daily intake. While the latter observations may not preclude a special nutritional role of fauna in the diet of Pan or the earliest hominid ancestor, the wide variation indicates that neither chimpanzees nor bonobos are obligate faunivores. It is unlikely that the common ancestor would have shared any special physiological or morphological adaptation to faunivory since no such adaptations are apparent in Pan, Gorilla, or Pongo. Others have approached this issue with much greater care from different perspectives and arrived at this conclusion” [“Chapter 7 Plants of the Apes: is There a Hominoid Model for the Origins of the Hominid Diet?,” Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution, ed. Peter S. Ungar andMark F. Teaford (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2002) 79.]
Given our physiology, and given the relative success of hunting and foraging in supplying nutrients, it would be surprising if humans did NOT, for the most part, throughout their history, subsist primarily on plant-based diets. Yes, humans have, throughout their evolutionary history, scavenged and eaten occasional meat, and yes, some of our ancestors hunted, but as anthropologists Craig Stanford and Henry Bunn point out in their massive review of the science regarding early Pleistocene Homo, “there is a consensus that hominid diets were primarily plant based, as they are among modern tropical foragers.” [Craig B. Stanford, and Henry T. Bunn, eds., Meat-Eating & Human Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 356.]
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As for the discrepancy in Ms. Catenese’s figures, there must be a difference in water usage for production, storage, etc., of beef as burger patties. That makes sense, but I would have to investigate that further.
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“Efficiency”, as in shaving things down to the last penny, is a misguided goal in an advanced system, such as a school or a society, or even an airplane. In a system you need first and foremost, a lot of redundancy in case things go wrong, even though at first blush that might seem more extravagant. Do you need two lungs or two kidneys instead of one? Answer: Yes. Though it might not look “efficient” to a business-minded person.
The focus on misguided notions of efficiency is the basic mistake of the running the “schools as a business model”, based on the outmoded economic ideas of the early industrial era. Down with the oligarchs, get them out of the education business!
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I should have said “complex system” not “advanced system”
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When it snows is it more efficient for everyone to shovel the street in front of their house or for one person to plow and everyone else have another cup of coffee while they’re waiting?
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Wise post, Harold! One of the reasons why ecologies are so much healthier than are monocultures.
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Jonathan Goldberg, I’m for another cup of coffee. 🙂 For some reason, my husband gets a charge out of the snowblower. If you gave him a little tractor with a plow, he would happily plow half the day away and not charge a dime. How’s that for efficiency?
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If American slaves lived long enough to reproduce it was an artifact of the fact that cultivation of tobacco and cotton was less arduous than cutting sugar cane — which in the Caribbean tended to be fatal and to require continuous infusions of new slaves from Africa. As for the wonderful feudal benevolence of Southern slave owners that is a consoling myth of the reconstruction South.
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yup
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James C. Cobb, by the way, is a former president of the Southern Historical Association, who has written widely on the interaction between economy, society and culture in the American South. His books include The Selling of The South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990 (Illinois, 1993), The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford, 1992),and Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (Oxford, 2005). His most recent book,The South and America Since World War II was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Try again with link to “Most Southern Place on Earth” – or you can cut an paste
http://books.google.com/books?id=WF3hl9UAODAC&q=life+expectancy#v=snippet&q=life%20expectancy&f=false
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Humanity and the pursuit of universal moral truths threatens the controls of the market (and the power of those controlling the market). It’s a very conscious decision to take over public education and remove from it true “critical thinking” to replace it with “efficient and accurate thinking within pre-approved parameters towards a pre-determined goal”.
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What you said. Did you come up with that sitting on the beach it looks like you are on? (Your hovercard)
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I would say, yes.
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We MUST start to offer a different version!!!! Prepare the signs for the long, hard road. We are the only ones who can do it.
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This has been one of the key debates in education for over 100 years. It has little to do with new technology, and we don’t need new counter-arguments. The old ones are fine.
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This issue is interesting of its own right, but for me, a blind person, it involves, on a certain level, my very independence and ability to contribute most effectively on a par with my fellow human beings who are sighted.
Technology has provided things only in the past few years that, had they been available when I was growing up, might have meant an exceedingly different school and community experience for me. Apple, in particular, has given me a level of access to information and activities that others take for granted.
When I was a child, I yearned to read the best-selling books my friends were reading. I was frustrated with my inability to read the newspapers and magazines my family and friends read, either via subscription, newsstand, or grabbed off a table at the doctor’s office. I ached to partake in the electronic games available. Most significantly and heartbreakingly, though, no one appeared to know how to accommodate my interest in science, at school or anywhere else.
Museums were an exercise in frustration. I heard descriptions and information, and I wanted to touch, to experience. Few wanted to stand and read me the tons of information at exhibits.
I was the one writing up the lab results in science class, unable to experience the lab itself. I absolutely loved physics, the concepts, the thrill of finding out about electricity, magnetism, the way the world worked. I fell in love with Carl Sagan at the age of thirteen; he, through Cosmos, taught me more than anything I could read in my science textbooks (if they were even Brailled on time), or what I could find on my own or hear in the classroom.
My kids, both blind, are having a significantly better experience. Their books are almost always on time. When Braille is not available, though, they have access to electronically generated books, supplemental materials, repositories of literature set up specifically for the print-disabled, apps for reading books as soon as they come out, newspapers galore, and even some magazines. (It is true that there are still hindrances, and many companies still balk at making their technology accessible, but it is leaps and bounds beyond what I could have imagined when growing up.)
There are GPS apps which assist if I become disoriented in an unfamiliar location. There are transportation apps which assist me with train schedules and what track a train will be on. My quality of life, my access to professional and personal growth and experience, and my children’s, are immeasurably better because of technology.
Yet, just as with virtually every advance, there is another side of the coin, a double edge to the sword, a weapon possible because of the tool. The same ability my iPHone has of taking pictures so that I can have them identified by an app (what type of soup is in the can in my pantry?), allows people to take pictures of complete strangers in embarrassing situations. The technology which allows me to ask a friend or family member on Facebook what just happened on a television program we are watching at the same time is the technology which is compiling tons of information about me and my friend or family member. The same hardware and software which is making education more engaging on a certain level is creating disconnection on another, devices and programs substituting for direct human interaction and collaboration.
Technology is a blessing and a curse, and it remains to be seen which way the scale tips in the coming decades.
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Great piece, Blind Noise! There are so many ways in which technology can be liberating.
And it’s so awful to see the ed deformers using it to lessen the quality of schooling and to make it more rigid and narrow and programmed.
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This is a nice reality check.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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“Since neo-classcial dogma teaches the IRrational inerrancy of the “the market” in determining the most efficient practices. . . “
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Your comments are right on track when you ask:
“Is the technological culture at odds with the humane goals of the Western intellectual tradition? Do we treasure only what can be measured? Or do we recognize that what we treasure most can seldom be quantified, unless it is money?”
I suspect that behind the superficial lure of a technological cure, is the true driving force that you have identified – profit.
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The technology is not the problem. The issue is who controls the technology.
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and how it is used
trains to take people to work or play versus trains to take them to the death camps; same technology, different people, different uses
The scary thing is that a lot of technocrats–not all certainly, buy many–have a rage for order. Donald Norman, in his The Design of Everyday Things, talks about a nuclear power plant where the control levers were all identically shaped and the operators had brought in beer taps and put over them so they could tell them apart easily. Gee, this one means raise the rods. This one means lower them. LOL. Freud called these anal retentive types. He had the etiology wrong, but he was spot on about the personality type. Folks who think that everything can be simply bullet listed, tested, evaluated, commanded, controlled, according to one, invariant formula. I think of this as a major personality disorder.
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Western intellectual tradition? The ship has sailed.
Currently, a tarnished football coach is in the running for presidencies at two Ohio public universities, because he claims he can boost donations.
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Just one point … Western cultural tradition is not to say the USA or even North America … the fact that this path is chosen at those Universities (if it happens) will not destroy Western Intellectual tradition or enhance it … we are to arrogant in this country.
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The 1%, worldwide, may preserve educational cloisters as a paean to western intellectual tradition.
Feudalism (Picketty’s book) and lofty ideals can coexist?
The values implicit in contract law, justice and democratic processes etc. would be at risk. Aren’t they?
The outcome of the Arab spring was?
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I think the popularity of this blog answers this presumed rhetorical question succintly. The problem has been defined. What is the resolution? That is the true question presented to us.
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As Maxine Greene espoused so well, teaching is so much more art than science.
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As Maxine Green espoused, teaching is so much more art than science.
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Soliciting the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable to be cheerleaders of top-down technocratic education “reform” was not an afterthought. It was part of the business plan. As indicated in the 1971 Powell Memo: A Call-to-Arms for Corporations, http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/ a primary aim was for businesses to take the lead, including convincing Americans that corporations are not evil.
We need to underscore to Americans they should not assume that corporations hold the interests of humanity sacrosanct. Their self-serving acts have indeed been evil, such as the oil industry’s cover-up of the dangers of lead in gasoline etc. and the tobacco industry’s denial of the harmful effects of cigarette smoking –both of which blatantly lied to Congress about it. Companies are firmly entrenched behind deregulation and corporate education “reform” and too many have historically had their eyes firmly fixed on the profit prize, not on the rights of people, including Gates, the Waltons, the Koch brothers et al. .
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Of course corporations don’t care about humanity. According to our neo-classcial economics overloards, the only thing corporate management should care about is maximizing “shareholder value”. Whether that means destroying the planet and killing billions is irrelevant.
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Liability affects shareholder value.
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Which is why you lobby to remove liability and get “too big to fail” bailouts! 🙂
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Years ago, my family had a neighbor who was making a killing in the asbestos industry. Literally. First, he made a fortune selling and installing asbestos. Then, after the dangers of asbestos became widely known and regulations were tightened here, his company changed gears and went into asbestos removal. At the same time, he expanded his business overseas, where he sold and installed asbestos, because foreign laws remained lax.
Always look very carefully at what a company will do just because they think they can get away with it.
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But if everyone just takes care of himself everything will be just fine. Self interest will make for a safe secure world, eh!
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This culture and technology thesis is interesting and seductive. I am going to look into it.
However, my initial thought is that this education reform thing is about really about money–a lot of money.
Those who control our financial world essentially control our politics and seemingly our media.
New and lucrative sustainable markets with guaranteed funding is a holy grail for our private equity folks. Think Social Security (we voted that down) and now public education.
Money. Money. Money. .
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They want to efficiently shovel the money into their own pockets, you mean. 🙂
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Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford (a graduate of the NYC public schools) laid out the antecedents and mass ideology we are headed for in his magisterial, two-part work, “The Myth of the Machine.”
Mumford went back to both ancient and recent history – from the Pharoahs to Hitler, Stalin and Mao – to analyze what he called the Megamachine, an immense social construct based on centralized authority, militarism, forced labor and remote control, all furthered by the tethering of science and technology to the needs of the State/Megamachine.
In our neoliberal era, where government is increasingly a junior partner to private Capital (see what is happening to state universities around the country, where humanities departments are shrinking or being closed, and the remaining departments are expected to form partnerships with businesses) private and public governance are merging. In our own little corner of the realm, high stakes exams created by a private corporation (Pearson) are treated like state secrets, with extreme penalties threatened against anyone who might reveal these “secrets” to the public who paid for them.
Mumford predicted a time when “every individual on earth” would be subject to an all-seeing eye, a Panopticon, that would ensure not only their obedience, but their inability to even conceive of an alternate way of life.
His term for that outcome was The Electronic Dark Ages.
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Great to see this mention of Mumford. He was a far-seeing fellow. I would like, also, to recommend Derrick Jensen’s great book on surveillance, Welcome to the Machine. He also discusses Bentham’s Panopticon. In fact, if memory serves me right, one of the chapters is called Welcome to the Panopticon.
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We can begin to “correct” ourselves by using the millions of dollars currently allocated for testing materials and the grading of them to hire art, phys ed, librarians and music teachers for every school. Higher more teachers to lower class size and fund perschool and after school programs. Let teachers teach and let kids have fun learning. Let’s reinsert our common sense and continue to produce creative productive citizens. China and Korea are totalitarian countries and are NOT models for us; those are cultures that produce high test scores, at ALL costs. Let’s NOT be like them, but deal with our own societal and economical issues to improve our children’s ability to learn well.
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One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Education Deformer is technocratic Philistinism. In the Rheeformish Lexicon, I refer to this as the Rheeformish faith, for it is very faithlike.
Two characteristics made ed deform faithlike: The tenets of deform are held passionately, with great fervor, and they are all simple.
The state of U.S. education is simple. What needs to be done to “fix” it is simple. Assessment is simple. Evaluation is simple What kids should learn is simple (you can put it in a single, invariant list of skills). Creating learning programs is simple.
Economic questions are all simple. All the solutions are simple.
Everything is simple to the education deformer. One might even say simple-minded.
You name it, it can be summarized in a single number. It can be put into a bullet list. It can be programmed into a few tracks in a software package. It can be Powerpointed.
I listen to or read one of these people and I think: This person is utterly clueless and absolutely sure of themselves.
Think of the typical smarmy David Coleman video.
simple simple simple
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cx: himself or herself, of course. Apologies for the typo. I need to edit these posts before hitting the Send button!
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Education is
the great handoff of culture between generations and
the means by which people discover and pursue and create themselves and
the means by which we create community
And all of these goals are being completely undermined by the particular varieties of technocratic Philistinism being championed by the ed deformers.
And that needn’t be the case. Technology could dramatically enhance the possibilities for each.
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cx: “the means” s/b, of course, “one of the primary means
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Quoting the commentary to start:
“Is the technological culture at odds with the humane goals of the Western intellectual tradition? Do we treasure only what can be measured? Do we resist and fight for the value of every child, for the value of deep and reflective learning, and for the principles of democracy?
To defeat this, we must start to offer a different vision. A vision that puts humans and human development ahead of “efficiency” and “rationality”. That’s a tall order. For me, it requires returning to the basic values of the Western intellectual tradition, since our current cultural monster arose from the abuses of modern thought that displaced the ideas of the Enlightenment after the Industrial Revolution. I think we can do this, but it will a long, hard road.”
The vision is well documented and easy to adopt by child or in groups of children at age 0-6. I suggest another book for you. The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori. Please read the last chapter first (chapter 28) and then the supporting chapters. There is nothing new about this as the pedagogy is 100 years old. And the concept of our young children being society’s love is 2000 years old. Since the 1960’s over 5,000 schools have emerged to prepare the children for kindergarten at levels defined by the child’s developing mind, aided by the adult. In general, via assessment and not testing, the child can be expected to have developed reading and math skills equal to 3rd grade by the end of kindergarten. By nature the sensitivity to develop this easy is lost after kindergarten so time and money is actually built into the human progression.
The vision to do just what is in the book (pedagogy is defined and proven) can solve a local school district’s problem school by school with the culture groups / community parents / schools making certain the child does not lose the development opportunity to learn language and order when the mind is most sensitive to such learning. New money is not needed to deliver 100% of the children ready as this would be defined. First thing first ready to read starting kindergarten would change everything.
The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori, Montessori – per the Teachers College, Montessori – Read and Write, A Parents’ Guide to Literacy for Children by Lynne Lawrence, Chapter 28 – a post by USA VALUES, LLC.
The family network, the faith in a positive expectation and the work to prepare the child to the level the individual child makes possible, step by step, (this is way past the requirements of today) is also the solution to poverty one family by one family or one group by one group.
I grant you that a public message of being ready to read is needed to change attitudes in mothers and school districts but all of this messaging is local, to be driven by the school district that actually has no choice but to do first things first right the first time sooner or later.
First things first location by location will not go away unless democracy slips from our children’s mind while we argue and distract ourselves with what is not first things first. The increase in present value of positive expectation from pre-k can be defined by you to be $500,000 for $10,000 extra cost. This is a promotional value that would be exceeded with a 4 year degree. This is not dollars in any one pocket but it is Western Civilization Value that centers around the concept of GDP.
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As someone who often writes here about the need to restore a humanistic outlook to public education, to include the best of the Western cultural traditions, I think it’s important to remember that people in other parts of the world can have a very different view of those traditions.
Asked what he thought about Western Civilization, Gandhi reportedly replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”
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Yes, for 2,000 plus years and even before the child and what the child could become with adult attention to the brain’s development has not been even closely a guiding light. Love of our neighbor and the child is conflicted by the same 7 deadly sins and fear of man. But we are close to doing first things first for economic reasons if and when we stop regressing and start helping the individual rights to freedom and democracy. But we do have to accept that literacy is freedom at age 6 – 9 and opens opportunity right here and now for the most at risk with time and money consequence.
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lol
I recently attended an evening of Indian classical dance. I remarked to the woman with me that the overwhelming impression was of being in the presence of something very deep and ancient and evolved. Those dances are the result of thousands of years of cultural development and accretion.
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The conversation here has been usurped by incidental interests. The fact that the Western intellectual tradition is subsiding has been written about by many, including Postman, Ellul and, I think, most brilliantly by Jacques Barzun (the book to read is The House of Intellect). This is a topic not normally broached on this blog. If we are to overcome the deformers, what will we offer in place of their Tayloristic schemes? If the old Western tradition cannot hold up in the face of the technological onslaught, what new curriculum should take its place? I like William Irwin Thompson’s program laid out in his book Transcending History and currently being implemented at the Ross School. Any other ideas out there worth sharing?
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I apologize, Jasmine, for taking the topic off track, above, for you are right, of course, about how important this topic is. I have three thoughts to share:
1. I have often wondered when the time will come that we can go back to worrying about such matters as how to get kids interested in reading novels and poetry, what texts we will teach, what ideas from what traditions, and so on. But I am suspicious of any and all who want to foist one plan on all. Here’s why: I think that what a teacher can most be to students is a model of what it is to be a learner. The teachers whom I most honor in my memory were the ones who were passionate about something and from whom I and others in their classes received the windfall of that passion. And those intellectual passions can’t and shouldn’t be legislated. They are idiosyncratic. Which is all to the best. Kids are idiosyncratic too. I would love to see kids have a motley assortment of teachers with very varied notions of what’s important and what’s not. Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
2. I love the idea of approaching all this from the following perspective: If teaching is The Great Handoff by which cultural attainments are passed from one generation to the next, to be modified and built upon and transcended and lived and passed on again, then the questions to ask are the very, very human one: what mattered to people, and why? What were the human concerns that this philosophy, this science, this art, this music, this literature responses to? What were the questions, the predicaments, the valued experiences that MATTERED to people that made them create these cultural products and that made them matter enough to others to pass them on? What we should share in school is what matters, and often what matters cannot be quantified and can only be experienced. School should be about what it is to be human. All schooling should be Geisteswissenschaften.
3. School should be, I think, an opportunity for students to experience the strange, the challenging, the unfamiliar, the wildly different. Think of the first few days in a foreign country–how heightened your experiences are in that new place. Well, we should do a lot of that–of shoving kids through the wardrobe, down the rabbit hole, through the tear in the space-time continuum, into a different world. School should present kids with powerful tools and ideas and ways of seeing–levers for the mind and the emotions, ones they would never have dreamed of. We spend a LOT of time worrying about whether what we give them will be familiar, will connect. But I think we should be thinking a lot more about giving kids experiences that are extraordinarily FOREIGN–not at all what they could have imagined. School should take them places they’ve not been, into the unfamiliar and odd and quirky and challenging and so build flexibility and imagination and creativity, by sending up preconceptions, by having them experience the Other–very different lenses on the world–so that they return translated, transmuted, and the ordinary, the familiar looks, from that vantage they took, strange, unfamiliar–so that they see it anew, as on the first morning of the first day, as though for the first time.
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And in all this, the point, of course, is to give kids tools for self and community creation, for frumsceaft.
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And it seems to me that there ought to be an awful lot of just that–of kids creating, of learning techniques for creating, in many, many forms–for trying all these arts and crafts and tools and techniques–toward that end of self discovery. I like the idea of saying, here are these thousands of possibilities. Try them on. See what works for you. Kids should learn to build things. To program. To paint. To play music. To dance. To perform. To write. To sing. To program. To design. Always with this question in mind–what is the human meaning of what is being done here? Why does it matter, and to whom?
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I think, for example, of how most people think, “I can’t draw.” But by using a very simple technique, the Durer grid, a teacher can teach almost anyone how to do very credible line drawings in perspective. And that ability–being able to do that–becomes a possibility, a tool in the toolkit for self creation that they kid comes away from school with.
Or people say, “I am not musically inclined.” But you can teach almost anyone how to choose some notes from a hat, throw them onto a staff, and use some fairly simple techniques to turn them into a theme and variations, and there is software that can play these creations back to kids. So, they learn, wow, I can actually write music. Another tool in the kit. Another ability that opens up possibility, the range of possibilities, for what this little person can make himself or herself into.
One could do worse than to think of schooling as giving people a very broad set of tools for self and community creation and exposing them to the best of examples of others using those tools and what they did with them.
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Lovely. Thanks for your input!
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The vision is well documented and easy to adopt by child or in groups of children at age 0-6. I suggest another book for you. The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori. Please read the last chapter first (chapter 28) and then the supporting chapters. There is nothing new about this as the pedagogy is 100 years old. And the concept of our young children being society’s love is 2000 years old. Since the 1960’s over 5,000 schools have emerged to prepare the children for kindergarten at levels defined by the child’s developing mind, aided by the adult. In general, via assessment and not testing, the child can be expected to have developed reading and math skills equal to 3rd grade by the end of kindergarten. By nature the sensitivity to develop this easy is lost after kindergarten so time and money is actually built into the human progression.
The vision to do just what is in the book (pedagogy is defined and proven) can solve a local school district’s problem school by school with the culture groups / community parents / schools making certain the child does not lose the development opportunity to learn language and order when the mind is most sensitive to such learning. New money is not needed to deliver 100% of the children ready as this would be defined. First thing first ready to read starting kindergarten would change everything.
The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori, Montessori – per the Teachers College, Montessori – Read and Write, A Parents’ Guide to Literacy for Children by Lynne Lawrence, Chapter 28 – a post by USA VALUES, LLC.
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Neoliberals are slaves to a CULT; unfortunately they have power because politicians believe this demented ideology put forward by the demented Milton Friedman and others of his ilk. Never mind facts, history, common sense. When you embrace a demented belief there should be NO restraint whatsoever on greed and support the right of the rich to step on your face forever, you are a cultist, an idiot.
I have no patience for any of that garbage being spewed here and elsewhere.
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If you sit here and separate the destruction of public education from the rest of movement to destroy the public sector for private gain, you will fail.
This has little to do with Taylorism, technology, or anything else. Those are just cover arguments. This has to do with THEFT. Everything else is an excuse to cover up the desire of the elites to loot from the taxpayers in order to enrich themselves further and to gamble away the trillions of dollars in taxpayer money on Wall Street so THOSE criminals can be further enriched. “Neoliberalism” is a fake ideology in support of what is in fact criminality.
These people are parasites and are bleeding the country dry.
This is all on Washington, D.C. politicians who have created this mess, and it started with Ronald Reagan’s embrace of crackpot Milton Friedman economics. ALL of the economic policies of the past thirty years need to be repealed, including the trade agreements, the tax cuts for the rich, and all economic policies that have forced the rest of us to pay more so the rich can have more. If there was more money going to federal, state, and local governments, you wouldn’t have this movement to loot public education.
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Susan, just call it a game: Grand Theft Public Sector
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It’s gangsterism, Diane. It really is. These criminals put Al Capone to shame.
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Diane, that is hilarious!
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Yes.
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Susan and Diane
The constraint that the public sector is constantly up against and is rigged against winning is the creation of new money. All new money at its source is created via debt with interest in Western Civilization. The interest is never created as new money so it constrains and causes change. The public has equity that is never used to create new money for new purpose.
The Web of Debt explains this fully by Ellen Brown. She is running for treasurer of California. Additionally, she is the founder of the Public Banking Institute that has a hand in 20 or so states that want to create their own money without the constraints of the Federal Reserve like North Dakota. The point is for some issues of major societal purpose the funding should come from equity because the payback, ROI is so great it should not be constrained with self interest. If the payback is not real – inflation will cause some havoc – but if the payback is real it has no effect on inflation. POINT BLANK I WANT TO CLAIM THAT THE ROI FROM DELIVERY OF EARLY READING SKILLS BEFORE KINDERGARTEN TO OUR MOST AT RISK CHILDREN HAS A ROI ADEQUATE TO AVOID INFLATION.
The greenback dollar used with the soldiers of the northern states to win the civil war is an example of created new money based on equity. (The laws supporting the greenback were never taken off the books) The private banking effort to issue no more of this equity as currency, retire the greenback currency based on equity and to wipe out even the thought of this type of equity was tremendous after the Lincoln murder and the void of goodwill for our most at risk citizens of the south and north.
Whoever controls the creation of new money is the 4th branch of government in the USA and is unseen by many in the USA and worldwide economy.
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