There is an open season for teachers in America. Assorted do-gooders and politicians, from Gates Foundations to Obama administration’s “race to the bottom” – or is it the top? –and with the support of economists who, true to their vocation, eagerly provide the needed conclusions, properly backed up with charts, graphs and statistics, to those in a position to pay for them, set their sights on “reforming” our schools by disciplining out of control teachers and their unions.
These thinly disguised political attacks and their pseudo-scientific support are, of course, nothing new in America. After all, this is the country that, as Stephen Jay Gould aptly demonstrated, successfully transformed crude racist and classist propaganda of assorted Euro-bigots and fascists to the respected science of intelligence testing taught at top universities. Clearly, the craze of standardized scholastic ‘aptitude’ testing, or measuring the ‘quality’ of teaching is the latter-days version of this old American tradition of employing scientific procedures to unscientific goals of measuring human moral worth and social standing. Many academic careers have been built on these efforts, and an entire testing-industrial complex has been created. But less evident is the fact that these education “reform” efforts manifest a broader cultural change - the redefinition of the concept of education from the old fashioned learning to the new brave all-American technical management of instruction.
Learning is an interactive process that involves the learner, the teacher and the social environment in which the learning takes place. I spent my entire adult life in educational institutions of one sort or another, either as a student or as a teacher, and from that experience I can tell that *the* most important element of a successful learning experience, like in a marriage, is a good interpersonal relationship between the learner and the teacher. However, establishing that relationship depends on the social environment of the learner and the student. I can illustrate this with a personal example.
When I was in high school, my "helicopter" parents traveled overseas on business, and I was raised by my grandparents for whom I could do no wrong. I used this newly acquired freedom to test the limits how far I could go, and I associated myself with the neighborhood thugs in a way not dissimilar to that depicted in the film "This is England". I was a nerdy kid often shunned and pushed around by popular kids, so being, or rather acting, like a thug was a sort of vindication of my respectability and dignity.
Acting out the "thug role" had a significant impact on my academic performance. To make a long story short, I made a conscious effort to be the most disruptive kid and collect the greatest number of failing grades in the entire school. My efforts were duly recognized and I was slated for expulsion, which meant the definitive end of my academic career due to the "early tracking" system that Poland, as most other European countries, used. However, my parents made a deal with the principal that I would be home schooled overseas, where my parents lived at that time, and after a year I would come back to school in the senior year to be able to graduate.
After my return, I started hanging out with a different crowd - counter-cultural nerds interested in poetry, philosophy, arts, literature, and kindred “hobbies” as my father, himself an engineer, called such pursuits. This again had a significant impact on my academic performance. No, I did not become a "good student" - toeing the line and jumping the hoops when told, which are an integral part of the scholastic life, was more than I could take. I was still a trouble maker, but of a different kind than before my forced temporary exile. Instead of an aspiring thug, I became an aspiring counter-cultural intellectual. In practical terms, this meant reading "controversial" books on art and philosophy and then using this newly acquired knowledge to challenge the conventional wisdom of the teachers. Consequently, I was able to graduate with decent grades, but as my final act of defiance I switched my "track" from science leading to a technical university and eventually a productive occupation in widget production aka the national economy, to the pursuit of a “hobby” – the study of philosophy in a liberal arts college.
By the simple method of inductive reasoning, this case identifies factors that could explain my change from a slated for expulsion thug to an aspiring countercultural intellectual during my high school years. The teachers were a constant throughout my high school years - pretty much the same bunch in my senior year as in my freshman year. So was the school - still in the same building as I write this - and the administration, the aging and old-fashioned functionaries of the educational bureaucracy. Therefore, the school and teaching quality cannot explain the change I underwent. What changed was my social environment effected by parental intervention, which had a significant impact on what is today called "availability for instruction." This change in environment can satisfactorily explain the change in my educational outcomes.
The main problem with the American view of education is that this relational and social character of the learning process is not recognized and acknowledged, at least officially. The chief reasons are, of course, political: creating favorable environment for the testing-credentialing industry and privatization of public services, managerial control of the workforce, teacher unions busting, and covering up dysfunctional aspects of social life in this country.
But these politically motivated efforts would not succeed without two central features of the American popular culture: aspirational individualism and compulsive managerialism. Aspirational individualism stresses the centrality of the individual as the focus of virtually every aspect of human life, which in turn stipulates the moral imperative to "free" individual from the "constraining influence" of the collective. Compulsive managerialism is the tacit assumption that all life problems can be effectively solved if they are properly managed by energetic, motivated, gung-ho, can-do, entrepreneurial, all-American individuals.
Viewed through the lenses of these two cultural biases - aspirtational individualism and compulsive managerialism - learning ceases to be a relationship between two equally involved and collaborating partners, the student and the teacher, and their social environment. Instead, it becomes a technical management problem in which the student is a passive material shaped by the teacher, and the outcome of this process is solely decided by the managerial skills of the teacher. In a word, it is like fixing that all-American dream - the automobile. The outcome depends solely on the skill and effort of the mechanic, while the material and the owner of that material have nothing to do with it.
This perception of the learning process dove-tails the political agendas of many social forces in the US whose interests otherwise diverge. These include not only the privatizers and teacher union busters - both Democrats and Republicans - who sell their agenda as steps to "improve" the technical skills of teachers-managers, or school administration that sells their effort to control workforce as the means to improve technical quality of instruction, but also parents and their advocates, politicians, and assorted do-gooders who blame teachers and schools for the failures of their children and absolve themselves - or the "downtrodden masses" in general - from the responsibility for their children's educational achievements or perhaps lack thereof.
It seems, therefore, that resisting educational "reforms" that center on "improving" or otherwise disciplining teachers is an uphill battle in this country that goes against not only powerful business interests, but popular perceptions, and excuse- and scapegoat-seeking as well.
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