Wander on over to Joanne Jacobs and Dangerously Irrelevant for one of the more interesting and emotional discussions about life in the classroom you’re likely to read. It started when DI last week posted a collection of You Tube student-filmed videos of teachers losing their cool over classroom disruptions. Joanne blogged about it this weekend and both sites are now crackling with debate. Is it the teacher’s fault? The students? The parents? Is video taping student activism or turning provocation into a sport for entertainment.
Watch the videos and read the posts, which feel like nothing less than a contemporary education rorschach test.
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read the posts, which feel like nothing less than a contemporary education rorschach test.
I think we are on to something here, but not that education has become a Rorschach inkblot test. Rather, it is that education cannot be separted from cultural issues. We are, as a population, completely and hopelessly divided. We are no longer ideologically compatible with each other.
The old model, where you take 25 students from all walks of life and stick them in a classroom to be taught by some teacher you don’t know personally from Adam to teach some curricula chosen by the polticial fiat of, well, morons…has failed. The game is up. This deal worked when our country was a true melting pot circa mid century, and everyone understood the need for cultural norms. Not today. We are mobile, multicultural, and it’s every man for himself.
People are just now starting to accepting the reality that the factory model of education cannot work in our era. These videos and discussions are merely the canary in the blog coal mine, gasping for the last breath.
The argument “X cannot work in our era” is as old as Aristophanes at least. Read The Clouds–there you’ll find a parodied educational debate that in some ways resembles ours, vital core!
In this play, first performed in 423 B.C., a Philosopher waxes nostalgic over the days when “posture was stressed and the decencies firmly enforced; the students stood in rows, rigidly at attention, while the master rehearsed them by rote.” The character Sophistry retorts that this is “musty, antiquated rubbish.” (tr. William Arrowsmith)
Allowing for some liberties that the translator may have taken, I’d say a well-conceived curriculum might help us start to understand what is indeed singular about our “era”… and what is not.
Allowing for some liberties that the translator may have taken, I’d say a well-conceived curriculum might help us start to understand what is indeed singular about our “era”… and what is not.
The argument “nothing ever changes” is older than Aristophanes.
It’s what the foolish Trojans said about Cassandra’s prophesies regarding Troy (1180 BC).
It’s the mistake of the boy crying wolf (600 BC, but Aesop’s fables were oral tradition, and some have even been found on Egyptian papyri nearly 1000 years before Aesop).
It’s foolish to think American education will stay the way it is as the whole world changes at the speed of light. Moon landings happen. Communism falls. Unions die. The American prison population reaches 1:100 people. The educational gap between the haves and have nots explodes to frightening levels. A flat world beckons. In 1994, the technology company I work for had 100% American engineers. By 2004, were were only 20%. Yet institutional education sycophants yawn.
My view: no “well-conceived curriculum” exists that can help people trapped in the past, whistling past the graveyard.
About “nothing ever changes”: agreed. I wasn’t implying that nothing ever changes. I said that a curriculum could help us see what is singular about our era and what is not.
I like what philosopher Luc Ferry has to say about this (in What Is the Good Life?, translated from the French by Lydia G. Cochrane): “The wisdom of the Ancients offers us the two basic conditions of all fruitful dialogue: kinship with, if not complicity in, the nature of philosophical interrogations that still shapes our thought, and a sometimes radical alterity in the responses and the visions of the world that underlie those interrogations.”
How could we begin to understand this kinship and alterity except through study? Or, if you argue that the kinship with the Ancients just isn’t there any more, perhaps you’d find some kinship/difference with the Italian and Russian Futurists of the early 20th century? F. T. Marinetti wrote in his “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909, “We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible?”
Things did not turn out the way the Futurists expected and hoped. Sadly, they were trapped in a “future” that took an awful turn once it reached them. Some of them didn’t even have a chance to whistle.