I recently received a letter from Professor Dr. Jochen Krautz, a professor of art education at the University of Wuppertal. Dr. Krautz is a critic of the PISA examinations, for reasons he makes clear in the posted article, which he wrote with economist Silja Graupe.
The article is aptly titled “From Yardstick to Hegemony,” and it analyzes the steady expansion of PISA, first seen as a yardstick, but eventually evolving into a means of disrupting the cultures and educational systems of every nation it tests.
As early as 1961, the OECD issued a conference volume in which its goals were clear:
The conference was explicitly not about setting standards which would do justice to respective national traditions of education and education policy. On the contrary, the new standard was geared toward overruling all traditional concepts. The same conference volume states that, with regard to developing countries, it would be “nothing short of cutting a million people loose from a way of life that has constituted their living environment for hundreds or thousands of years. Everything achieved by these countries‘ schools and education until now has served social and religious aims which have primarily allowed for resignation and spiritual comfort; things that completely go against any economic sense of progress. Changing these century-old approaches may perhaps be the most difficult yet also most important task for education to accomplish in developing countries.”5 It is important to note here that the OECD includes the nations of Europe in this circle of developing countries. Germany, for example, “due to its decentralized school administration system (…) may also be considered a somewhat underdeveloped country with regard to its education policy“.6 The obvious consequence is that Germany is to be subjected to cultural uprooting as well.
The OECD program has declared war on the established plurality of educational goals and discourses (which have consistently reflected and renewed these goals) in order to replace it with a single novel concept: “Schools should lay the very foundation for the attitudes, desires and expectations motivating a nation to pursue progress and to think and act economically.”7 It is no longer about teaching people how to set their own standards in a socially responsible manner. Instead, the goal of education is to achieve “competency in constant adaptation“,8 particularly with regard to adaptation to abstract economic demands. The OECD Conference documentation of 1961 declares unequivocally:9 “It goes without saying that the educational system must be an aggregate of the economy, it is just as necessary to prepare people for the economy as real assets and machines. The educational system is now equal to highways, steel works and chemical fertilizers”.10 Thus the claim can be made “without blushing and with good economic conscience“ that “the accumulation of intellectual capital is comparable to the accumulation of real capital – and in the long range may outmatch it”.11 The OECD has adhered to this same human capital theory until the very present. In the OECD book Human Capital of 2007 one reads for instance that “individual capabilities” are „a kind of capital – an asset just like a spinning wheel or a flour mill” which can “yield returns”.12 Congruously the OECD has since 1961 considered education to be an „economic investment” in humans,13 where teachers – as the “production factor”14 – and students – as the “raw material“15 – play a decisive role. Today the willingness and ability to adapt is even considered by the OECD as a core competence.16 Its concept of literacy – embodied in the term reading competency – has meanwhile become the basis for Germany’s education standards and is primarily geared to “how well adults use information to function in society and the economy”….
The environment to which pupils and students are to adapt is not the economy of real experience but rather a mere ideal concept generated by mainstream economists, particularly those of the Chicago School of Economics who, in their pursuit of “economic imperialism”18, have applied it to education: Its concept of a market is a purely abstract super-conscious price and coordination mechanism according to which all human activity must be aligned. What this unrealistic worldview setting in turn impedes is any critique or will to change because rather than being understood by the public as a theoretical construct it is, according to the neoliberal economist August Hayek, accepted by most as an immediately evident truth.19 Whether they are true or false, economic theories and all assessments based on these (such as PISA) determine reality. Those who choose criteria as a yardstick for everything else establish an arbitrary point of standardization where verification need not be feared.20 These ungrounded criteria then become – untested and without further thought – the defining norm for all further actions. As long as people believe having more PISA points is better than less in order to be successful economically they will, of course, do everything they can to acquire more. Education is then forced to uncritically yield to the pressure of comparative assessment, even if it is based on pure assertion.
If you believe that education should be based on humanistic goals, or that it should be tied to concepts of democratic citizenship, or to some other paradigm, you are out of luck. PISA has decided that the purpose of education is economic competition and development.
Please read this essay. It is enlightening.
This makes me think about all those proverbs that elevate morality over economics, ex.
better is the poor in his integrity, than the deceitful rich”, “a dinner of vegetables with love is better than a fattened calf with strife”.
Life is more than the accumulation of stuff. When Jesus said “I came to give them Life and that more abundantly” he never intended that to mean more materialism. I guess people like Mother Teresa are “stupid losers” in this paradigm that economic development is “god”……but then that is what evolutionary sociobiology can lead to (ask Hitler)
Again with the evolution and the Hitler?
I think perhaps you have followed RL more closely than I have, Flerp, but from a less informed viewpoint it seems to me that he is referring to social Darwinism rather than some overzealous application of conservative Christianity. Is that possible?
I don’t know about “conservative,” but it’s my understanding that RL is a “young Earth creationist” who believes that the theory of human evolution is incorrect, leads to Social Darwinism, and is at least partly responsible for the Nazi Holocaust.
FLERP, “guilty” I am, as charged…..and so is Hitler (the connection between Darwin’s own racist views in his work “the descent of man”, and Hitler’s views of “superiority” are undeniable, well-documented, valid…and only questioned and denied by those whose agenda is to protect Darwinism, and attack those that question the data and interpretation that tries to connect apes to humans [which the fossil record does not support….if you do some serious homework….of which most darwinists do not]. So, stereotype me as you will ; the belief that all people are created equal is something Darwin denied.
“. . . that tries to connect apes to humans [which the fossil record does not support….if you do some serious homework….of which most darwinists do not]”
Rick, your understanding of the evolutionary process is quite stunted as evidenced by your statement about “apes to human”. The fossil record indeed does show the many changes involved in the evolution towards current homo sapiens from prior species no longer around (extinct) some of which may or may not have been a common ancestor to both the “human ape” and chimps, bonobos, gorillas, etc. . . .
Duane, I simplified my statement, and yes I know about all the other possible branches. The problem with the fossil record, and the radiometric dating techniques used to create the “biostratigraphic onion layers of the assumed geologic column”, is that many times the “more evolved” form is found in layers older than the assumed ancestral form. As S Gould and D Ager admitted, that most sequences are more imagined than real because of this problem, ex. H. sapiens artifacts found in layers older-dated than Cro-magnon bones. Read “Bones of Contention” by Marvin Lubenow for many examples of this problem, and some of the outright fraud (ex. Piltdown Man) that evo-anthropologists have committed. While all of this may not “refute” human evolution, it at least points out many dilemmas, paradoxes and enigmas.
There are numerous issues with a vocational approach to education such as that which OECD espouses. It assumes that this core base of knowledge that they value will make it possible for each person to vie for their own care and place in the workplace – and that need will drive creativity and productivity.
This approach though necessitates a very “me” centered reality – meritocratic in nature when we know society is not built with everyone on equal footing, and that the unequal footing intrudes into a person’s education, and that not everyone has the same abilities, and in almost everyone, people have aptitudes for some things and a complete lack of natural ability in others. This is individuality.
The end result, is that those who benefit from unequal footing will maintain it because education does not change the basic economics that enable people to grow into healthy thinking workers. It’s much more challenging to be an abstract thinker absorbing difficult material when you have food insecurity and safety issues as opposed to the opposite.
OECD defining education in this way blames people for failing to be economically productive, even though there are numerous places where this isn’t true and we’ve traditionally prided ourselves on taking care of our weakest members, not throwing them to the wolves.
Making economics the center of education has very perverse side effects as to how we regard our fellow human beings. Religions, clans, tribes and the like formed because people felt stronger together and accomplished more together – not because they believed they should be competing with each other on an existential basis daily – in fact quite the opposite.
This approach seems to desire a return to a more primitive time where if I didn’t get that piece of meat at all costs, it would be a choice between my life and your death. This is competition, not cooperation, and it is not civilized or civilization.
Human beings are more than cogs in the economic wheel. This narrow definition of humanity is what prevails when an economic paradigm is accepted as truth. Education is more than preparing humans for their economic role in society. While preparing people for a career is a function of education, it should not be the defining role. I agree with Dewey on this: “Education is a social process; it is growth; education is not preparation for life, but life itself.”
Thank-you for this excellent article. Breaking the market-god myth will take significant efforts from the 99%. I think it’s a sign of hope that more scholars are enlightening our public discourse by reaching beyond the wall of the institution.
Case in point- The Myth of the Meritocracy by Lani Guiner. In this excerpt she shows how the ACT & tests are now a proxy for merit that benefits only the 1%. This mythological meritocracy has morphed into a testocracy hence driving the false belief that tests have magical powers.
“Call it what you will, the SAT still promises something it can’t deliver: a way to measure merit. Yet the increasing reliance on standardized test scores as a status placement in society has created something alien to the very values of our democratic society yet seemingly with a life of its own: a testocracy.”
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/11/ivy_leagues_meritocracy_lie_how_harvard_and_yale_cook_the_books_for_the_1_percent/
“Testocracy” nicely complements the “testosteronacy” that we Americans have had for some time now.
SomeDAM Poet: Banesh Hoffman in THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (2003 paperback republication of the 1964 edition of the 1962 original, pp. 216-217) called the whole testing-centered view of learning and teaching, well, the very last paragraph of his slim volume—
[start quote]
All methods of evaluating people have their defects—and grave defects they are. But let us not therefore allow one particular method to play the usurper. Let us not seek to replace informed judgment, with all its frailty, by some inexpensive statistical substitute. Let us keep open many diverse and non-competing channels towards recognition. For high ability is where we find it. It is individual and must be recognized for what it is, not rejected out of hand simply because it does not happen to conform to criteria established by statistical technicians. In seeking high ability, let us shun over dependence on tests that are blind to dedication and creativity, and biased against depth and subtlety. For that way lies testolatry.
[end quote]
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The article is very informative. Thank you.
The OECD is just expressing the essence of the Progressive—Deweyist— vision of the mission of public schools; a vision of a distorted understanding of the relationship between teachers, children, and society.
The odiousness of this document, it’s arrogance and utter lack of humanity that smack of fascism, should make all rational people demand an end to the PISA test and a removal of the OECD from any function in education policy. And it helps show that the mindset that lead to Common Core, high-stakes testing, data collection for “workforce development” and the hidden agendas behind all of that, have been with us for decades.
We have to rethink the mission of the public schools. We have to return to the liberal arts and stop the insanity of social engineering, especially through public education. Training and coach youg intellects should be enough. Children are not machines to be rolled off school assembly lines for pre-determined functions in some sort of social-economic “machine”.
The failure of these ideas in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, and Soviet Russion should be apparent. But we can’t ever seem to stop those who would play God and run (read: ruin) our lives. That is until we stop listening to their siren songs and call bullshit on their stupidity.
I think you seriously misunderstand Progressive/Deweyian philosophy. Dewey is spinning in his grave over the onslaught of testing and international ranking.
I disagree. Many of Dewey’s and the Progressives’ ideas about society have lead to the sort of élitist oppression that we’re seeing today. I agree that he and they may not have intended that result, but their intentions don’t trump relaity.
I hope everyone will read the entire paper. Note the paper’s discussion of the influence of Walter Lippmann’s ideas of “Manufacturing Consent”. Lippmann was a leading figure in the Progressive movement, who developed the monder PR industry with Edward Bernays (one of Signmund Freud’s nephews).
People forget the dark side of the Progressives, the paternalism and the judgmentalism that created the eugenics movement.
But if have a different view, then please share it.
Once again Dienne is correct! The connection these scholars made in their paper between OECD – the Chicago School of Economics (ala Milton Friedman) – and Hayek can be traced to the conservative camp. Friedman, after all, was the economic guru of the Reagan administration. Dewey is, indeed, spinning in his grave. In addition, the authors point out the relationship between Lippman and Hayek. Here we begin to see the roots of neoliberalism and how neoliberalism will impact current corporate education reform in the United States. Don’t blame John Dewey.
Tom
Thank you for this. It provided more fodder for my art exhibit Dollar$igns. There is almost no way to talk to people about this so I’m making visuals. Just the vocabulary of this document is chilling.
Reblogged this on onewomansjournal.
Thanks, Diane. It is horrid out there. Glad I am not a kid. I would rebel and be jailed.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The OECD war against national and ethnic cultures by using the PISA test to break the religious and cultural ties that bind until everyone is cut from the same cloth. Isn’t this what the Nazis attempted to do with the concentration camps.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but what the OECD is doing with PISA is another attempt to do what the Nazis did during World War II with Concentration Camps.
If true, that means the PISA is a tool to destroy religions and cultures across the planet.
To succeed, eventually, there will have to be death camps again to deal with those people who will not cooperate. We already see that happening in the corporate Charter schools in the U.S. that throw out the most difficult to teach students and only keep those that do what they are told without question.
I wonder what Bill Gates would look like with that little Hitler mustache under his nose.
All should read and understand just what the article is saying. Quite important to realize all of the unintended consequences of these types of educational malpractices.
“Schools should lay the very foundation for the attitudes, desires and expectations motivating a nation to pursue progress and to think and act economically.”
I don’t know of course, but I think people eventually reject this. It’s relentlessly grim and technocratic.
I think people have an intuitive understanding that markets are supposed to serve people, not the other way around.
Too, when it translates into “politician” it ends up sounding like a stern lecture on how the politician is deeply disappointed in the quality of the workforce. It’s really arrogant.
Listen to Duncan on the “skills gap” sometime. He’s basically lecturing the people who pay him on how they’re not meeting his expectations. It has the most clueless scolding tone I have ever heard.
Chiara: given the actual socioeconomic realities in which we live, it is also a clarion call for servility and mindless obedience on the part of the vast majority.
Hence your last paragraph is spot on.
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I love the big debate about how we have to “start” respecting vocational training and skilled trades. I never disrespected vocational training and skilled trades. I don’t know anyone who did. I don’t know who this lecture is directed to, and I’m particularly confused why politicians are giving it to people in places like Cleveland. They already know that there.
Over half a century ago when taking an education course, our professor told us of a recent happening. He was asked by a European professor a question. He did not know who was the most surprised, He by the question or the European professor by his answer.
The question: After final exams how many suicides do you have? When our professor answered none, the European professor was stunned. They always had several. The stress of the tests and their importance, or perceived importance, was too much for their students to handle.
Are we headed in that same direction? A question worth considering.
But then, if “the economy” slackens, everybody turns to education for help, and the help asked for is getting marketable skills not prayers. Hopes that humanistic goals can feed the masses are faint. It takes only a mild crisis and citizens loot supermarkets. I have seen it. I wish it were not so. But really, what alternatives are there today? Living materialistically is at least very close to the human experience. And with the current horror of killing satire with bullets no religious sentiment seems remotely acceptable.
Correct me if I am wrong, the irony of it all is that neo-liberal thought managed to merge with some sort of discourse on traditional values (religion), choice, liberty.
The Education Profession has been crawling with economists, public policy wonks, and PoliSci majors for years. I was under the impression that they could not find other meaningful employment, could easily exploit education, feel powerful as they kicked teachers to the curb & made buco bucks through foundations while playing educators on TV…cushy, cushy! This paper explains much of their history, purpose and doings. Our obsession with PISA results, widgets, products, accountability, assembly lines, standardization…making sense to me now.
What little children?
Developmentally ready?
Art, Music & Dance?
Are we kidding?
Only importance is the End product.Pseudo…
Scary to say the least.
Diane, Your title is taking seems to be taking a lesson from Fox News; it has little to do with the article. There is no revolt, but rather of sharing of information, mainly that when it comes to driving the economy of developing counties, the OECD has been more concerned with using the data to drive change in their economies than driving education in ours…classic chicken or the egg.
There is no chicken or egg here. Education preceded the OECD – we committed to a course of public education to solve very real societal problems but different cultures came up with similar solutions to different problems so their systems were different but the same with different end goals.
OECD decided the purpose should be economic, and premises all that follows that economic ends should trump all for all cultures. Their data driven approach is the egg of the chicken because schools existed long before their concerns did, and they did intend to willfully control all education to that end and their enforcement was a limited scope of data – not looking at the whole child, but rather, cognitive skills.
Our education system wasn’t collateral damage, the world was the target including us.
It is easy to forget that the E in OECD is for “economic.” That frames eveything the organization does, including the use of PISA scores and narratives about deficiencies in economic performance, or praiseworthy policies that match the rhetoric of free enterprise.
Here is just part of the economic reasoning now being promoted as the basis for social policies in the US and in Great Britain. The aim is to shift the authority to make decisions about priorities for social policies and programs, including education, to private investors. Mediating this process are calculations designed to show how much the “government” saves by letting private investors lend the government some money, charge interest, add the cost of intermediaries (deal making lawyers, accountants, etc) plus pay investors a bonus for “success” in meeting or exceeding the production targets for the social programs.
Brace yourself. This is lightly modified and severely edited for length from the Robin Hood Foundation metrics.
Program is a high-quality preschool for New Yorkers. (XX children enrolled in a high-quality preschool) * (XX percent of children attend a high-quality preschool solely because of this program) * ($50,650 value of preschool)
Explanation:
The number of children enrolled in a high-quality preschool is based on the actual number reported by the agency to whom we lent money. Our staff estimates the percentage of children who attend a high-quality preschool solely because of the agency program.
We estimate the benefit of high-quality pre-kindergarten programs by estimating their impact on: the rate of high school graduation among enrollees and, through that mechanism, the impact on future earnings and health. We also estimate the impact of high-quality pre-K programs on juvenile delinquency, child abuse, parenting skills, parental earnings and fees that parents no longer need to pay for child care. As outlined below, we estimate the total benefit of pre-K programs on poor New Yorkers from all enumerated impacts to be $50,650 per student.
High school graduation rates: Earnings impact of high-quality pre-kindergarten programs. We start by assuming a counterfactual graduation rate of 50 percent (NYCDOE, 2009): 50 percent of the black and Hispanic students who apply to pre-kindergarten programs funded by Robin Hood (mostly black and Hispanic students) would graduate high school in the absence of our programs.
Next, we assume that high-quality pre-kindergarten programs ….. boost the odds that students eventually graduate from high school by 30 percent. The 30 percent figure emerges from sophisticated longitudinal studies of three high-quality pre-K programs: Abecedarian (Campbell & Ramey, 2010), Perry (Schweinhart et al., 2005) and Chicago (Reynolds et al., 2010) studies.
We then estimate the impact of academic progress on earnings. We infer that 50 percent of students living in poverty and who graduate high school do not enroll in college. They earn $6,500 a year more than do high school dropouts on average. Of the 50 percent of high school graduates who do enroll in college, 60 percent do not graduate college and will earn $11,500 more per year on average than do high school dropouts; 15 percent of those who enroll in college earn an A.A. degree, earning $19,000 more per year on average than do high school dropouts; and 25 percent of those who enroll in college earn a B.A. degree, earning $39,000 more per year on average than do high school dropouts.
This demonstration goes on and on. Here is the summary. Overall benefits
We estimate that the overall benefit of high-quality preschool on children and families is about $50,650 calculated as follows: $50,004 present discounted value of earnings benefits and education-related health benefits + $2,602 earnings benefits of decreased juvenile delinquency + $1,440 overall estimated benefit of decreased child abuse + $330 in QALY benefits of improved parenting + $700 in saved child care fees + $1,200 estimated increase in parental employment = $56,276, reduced by 10 percent to account for possible double-counting across benefits = $50,648, rounded to $50,650.
I have seen other accounts that blatantly refer to “high cost students” who, for reasons of birth, illness, genetic problems or other circumstances are disqualified from these so-called “pay for success,” or “cash on delivery” or “social impact bonds.” All of these schemes are contracts, described as Byzantine, that guarantee the loan repayment to investors with interest (5% often cited), add the costs of the dealmakers and monitors of performance (rarely visible) and so on—all for a low risk investment in proven-to-work social programs. These programs would cost less if paid for with direct government funding and use of the same performance measures that are now attached to most of these funds. This bit of research from an art educator in the United States.
Source:https://www.robinhood.org/metrics
I find this galling! How is it they get to determine a country’s culture. They are not omniscient. Where do they get off thinking that they know more than anyone else? Where do they get the idea that their beliefs are more deserving than anyone else’s? To me this is the height of pride. And I can’t help but ask, why do we allow them to bully us like this?