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Fantasy Curriculum

  
  

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Cat Chant
12:29 / 20.10.05
This thread spins off from this one ('Intelligent Design, Creationism, And Rightwing Social Memes'), which begins to talk about the principles of education pretty much from page 2 (here), but is designed to stand alone. It's a thread for talking about what you think should be taught in schools. Feel free to invent a fantasy curriculum/school structure here, but please be as specific as you can ("science should be taught" - but how? Learning scientific truths by rote? Reading The Origin of Species in its social context? Experimentally verifying the boiling point of water?), and please justify it (why should science be compulsory?) I'm hoping that in this way we can start to get at the meta-questions: what is school for? What knowledges do we see as crucial to the development of new and growing human beings, and how does that intersect with the social and institutional function(s) of schools?
 
 
sdv (non-human)
18:52 / 20.10.05
It is only the meta-questions that are interesting here - for the curriculum based issues can only confirm that an education system (any education system) is structured to maintain the social in current form. Which is to remember that where education used to have primarily disciplinary functions, it now, in the control society has increasingly self-disciplinary functions.

In short if you imagine - that education, church, family, legal system, peer groups can be so easily proposed as having different fuctions then the totalizing nature of our society is being avoided...
 
 
astrojax69
22:03 / 20.10.05
a great thread, deva. shall have to give it much thought, but as a quick swipe of my mind, i think schools have a responsibility to pass on the learning of the culture in which they exist, as well (and more importantly) as the methods of learning and the discipline to question our experience of the world in which we find ourselves.

to this end, such basic staples of a curriculum should include comprehensive language, numeracy and thinking (logic) skills as well as a stream that encourages creativity and self-awareness, and one to develop the physical attributes and qualities of the person (including phys ed. as well as nutrition and sex ed, etc). the concept should be to foster inquisitiveness and empower the students with the tools of the culture so they can participate in society in a rich and cohesive way. [ooh, i bet that baits someone...]

i think the only benefits (and this does not serve to underestimate them) of a national curriculum is to ensure some even manner of measuring or quantifying the students' capacity to participate in national fora post-education (such as employment, tertiary studies, etc) this is a vexed question and i'd like to see the nuts and bolts of the curriculum discussed here, more so than that issue. but that's just me.

the matter of school v church: church is a matter of faith and is not entirely crucial to the successful participation in society. school, on the other hand, is the the principle (but never never the only) method of instruction on learning about society and how to engage with it. peer groups will alwyas, by definition, have strong sway, and families - well, that is another kettle of fish!

an ideal curriculum, yes, would 'stream' kids through different aspects of their education, but the socialisation of peer groups and the interconnectedness of the various threads of the whole curriculum should not be compromised. is it fair to have a maths prodigy of nine in a social group of fifteen year olds just 'cause s/he is good at one discipline? a matter to consider...
 
 
Mr Tricks
23:14 / 20.10.05
Another question: In the car obsessed society of the U.S. should there be a Standardized National Driver's Education system.

Lord knows driver's in Cali are of a very different breed than Driver's in N.Y.C.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
09:15 / 21.10.05
That the curriculum is not the same now as it was earlier in the 20th century is worth noting I think. Almost nobody under the age of 40 went through the pure disciplinary curriculum – which was in a sustained transition towards a curriculum that could support a more control orientated society, the transition lasting from say 1968 to the early 1990s.

The disciplinary curriculum was structured around the primary elements of discipline that Foucault identified as emerging in the 18th C – the methods of observation, recording, calculation, regulation, training to which the body (‘nobody knows what the body can do’) was subjected, and had been subjected earlier in military and religious institutions. It became a facet of general everyday domination. A critical aspect of this being the redefinition of ‘the domain of the non-conforming’ a delightful phrase that contains a range of ongoing unspeakable horrors. The purpose underlying the disciplinary changes was to establish the regulation and ordering of human singularities, the formation of controllable individuals. This structure began to collapse in the post-war era and probably around 1970 was in a deep crisis.

The difference that Deleuze identifies is between disciplinary societies and control societies is best understood through the example he uses; the discipline of the factory – which functioned as a steady state model with the production of goods and the lowest possible wages. A worker being an entity in the productive system that could organize within unions for mass resistance. (hence the Marxist-leninist model…) and the control society where the dominant model is the more abstract one of the business, the network, in which it is the function of the individual to engage in competition and endless education and re-education in order to prove their value to the business, in the process attaining a certain salary. The lack of work based collectivity is an extraordinary reflection of the constant variation and change that individuals live under in the control society.

Specifically then the previously existing concepts of the mass and the individual are collapsing, to be replaced by the new forms of domination. The current educational curriculum (for endlessly re-educated students and teachers/lecturers alike) is structured and endlessly restructured to support these changes. The national curriculum is merely one aspect of this but a significant one – it appears to be aimed at being more closely designed to the needs of an individual but this masks it’s being part of the system of domination. Which is in part to merely suggest that the new techniques of control are endlessly isolating individuals. The loss of the old forms of collectivity being one of the things that we will live to regret.

The move towards continuous assessment in schools and universities, is reflected in the wider society by it’s use, for example in the work place, this has the effect of making the work place of greater threat, of absolute fluidity. Which is precisely what continuous assessment is used for within the educational system…. The endless assessment of individuals which is built into the curriculum is designed to turn the individual into an object that is incapable of resistance, with no ability to do anything but go with the flow required by the institutions within which it must exist.
 
 
Perfect Tommy
00:52 / 22.10.05
Please forgive me the near one-liner, but the lab is closing, and this is practically the whole of the post I would make anyway:

More math, more math, more math. Especially the more puzzle-solvey things which have sadly been hidden behind the weeding-out calculus classes. I really think that math is to abstract thinking as yoga is to physical health--maybe you don't need to put your leg over your head in 'real life,' but being capable of doing so means you don't get injured when you slip off a curb, if you get my drift.
 
 
Lurid Archive
21:37 / 22.10.05
The move towards continuous assessment in schools and universities, is reflected in the wider society by it’s use, for example in the work place, this has the effect of making the work place of greater threat, of absolute fluidity. Which is precisely what continuous assessment is used for within the educational system…The endless assessment of individuals which is built into the curriculum is designed to turn the individual into an object that is incapable of resistance - sdv

I have *some* sympathy with this point of view, and would certainly agree that one of the de facto functions of education - I'm speaking of the UK here, since I don't think this generalises well - is to instill a certain kind of apathy. But one has to be careful here since it isn't a function that, as far as I can see, is intentional. Rather it is a systematic product of the pressures which are put on education.

In primary and secondary education, continuous assessment serves the demand of vocal parents to know about their child's progress and for ministers to be able to demonstrate improvement. At university, continuous assessment is increasingly favoured because it "flattens and narrows" result distribution - this is important if one is running a testing system in which no one is allowed to fail and also explains why students tend to like it. One of the consequences of all this is that education serves to preserve socio-economic hierarchies. For my money, the deadening of students comes from elsewhere.


As to the question in the abstract...deciding exactly what should be taught is probably a rather involved exercise. But what should the purpose of education should be to enable people to function in society, to enrich them by making them aware of our culture and cultures and to provide some measure of egalitarian economic oppurtunity. So literacy and literature are obviously essential, as are history and some awareness of both politics and geography. Like tommy, I'd add numeracy (the level of general innumeracy is pretty shocking, imo) and a knowledge of science which need to be taught in some sort of historical context. That is, one needs to explain the way these ideas developed, for instance the scientific method, rather than presenting a completed product which a student has no chance of hoping to appreciate. Of course, such a "history" is going to be pretty bogus, but it is better than nothing.
 
 
Unconditional Love
21:53 / 22.10.05
The child should possess the curriculum, the choice should be down to the child and what the child wishes to learn and do. A level of general knowledge should be taught up to age 10 perhaps with no specific areas higlighted but all taught as equally as possible. Then the child should choose and as broad a range of topics should be presented as possible for choices to be made from.

The worst thing i found about education was that the value of certain areas were imposed upon me, i felt forced into learning certain things that i have never ever used in my life, or caused me alot of distress. The choice has to be given to the children and taken away from an imposed curriculum
 
 
illmatic
08:58 / 24.10.05
the choice should be down to the child and what the child wishes to learn and do

Agreed. With the caveat it's extremely unlikely to happen on a large scale in a modern (post?) industrial society like ours, as it's hard to make this type of education fit the demands of the economy. Our attitudes towards education, freedom and self-regulation reinforce this (self-regulation in an educational context might be defined as "trust in the ability of a child to follow hir own interests in a useful and enjoyable way without coercion").

I don't have time to post in this a lot today but I'll come back to it. The most up to date resource I've seen on this is David Gribble's Real Education: Varities of Freedom

I dropped the author an appreciatory email, and he commented their seems to be minimal takeup of these ideas in the UK, though he's always getting speaking invitation elsewhere. Don't know why this is, but feel it's worth mentioning.
 
 
illmatic
09:04 / 24.10.05
A quote from the link:

Ideal school-leavers would be literate and numerate, of course, but they would also be happy, considerate, honest, enthusiastic, tolerant, self-confident, well-informed, articulate, practical, co-operative, flexible, creative, individual, determined people who knew what their talents and interests were, had enjoyed developing them, and intended to make good use of them. They would be people who cared for others because they had been cared for themselves.

I'd add that a key element of the "fantasty" curriculum for me would be the emotional well-being - basic happiness - of the child would be considered as much as part of the curriculum as stuffing them with facts.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
09:46 / 24.10.05
Lurid/all,

A couple of key differences: (things that might be explored...)

"...I'm speaking of the UK here, since I don't think this generalises well - is to instill a certain kind of apathy. But one has to be careful here since it isn't a function that, as far as I can see, is intentional...." I think rather that it should be considered as intentional. That the changes are deliberatly being made in support of specific social and economic structures. I suspect, without sufficient evidence to prove it of course, that once neo-liberal economic and social policies were adopted (a.k.a. globalization) then the curriculum changes were in some sense inevitable. It is clear that the changes in curriculum across the western world are all functioning to support the imposition of the functions required by control rather than discipline. That differences in the curriculm change are probably related to the amount of resistence that the attempted changes create - for example less in the USA and the UK than in France and so on. But nonetheless related changes are being made across the education systems.

"...For my money, the deadening of students comes from elsewhere..." Sure - if students are 'deadened' then it is a consequence of the totality of their/our existence and not as a consequence of the education system. However whilst we no longer live within a socio-economic system where collective responses and collective resistences come easily to people(us) - I still don't like the implication that once students were more alive.

In point of fact I'd like to establish (in the here and now) that the education system across the entirity of the western world is better now than at any time in history. It's always difficult to remember how appalling the disciplinary education system was... (until 1967 the majority of children left school at 15 - with what can best be described as a non-education).

However it's probably most important to resist the privitization of the educational model, neo-liberals currently want to extract schools from any form of democratic control and enable them to be run as institutiomns to generate profit. This will embed an unworkable and reactionary ideology into the curriculum. The neo-liberals have learnt the political lesson well 'get them young...'

Finally then - what would I like in the curriculum ? Only those things that help train them to think. Anything else will not ultimately help them in the increasingly liquid control society....
 
 
Cat Chant
10:24 / 24.10.05
Astrojax69 wrote that

schools have a responsibility to pass on the learning of the culture in which they exist

and Lurid glossed the purpose of education as being

to enable people to function in society, to enrich them by making them aware of our culture and cultures

This is where I always bump up against myself when I'm planning fantasy curricula - it seems to be Foucauldian in its optimism/pessimism, in that schools are always going to produce individuals who are capable of functioning in a society. This isn't a priori a good thing, of course, since any society is going to be more-or-less fucked in certain ways: classical Roman education, for example, turned elite children into good slave-owners, thus maintaining the society's massive dependence on slave labour. What I'm particularly interested in at this point in the thread, though, is this from sdv (on what ze would like on the curriculum):

Only those things that help train them to think. Anything else will not ultimately help them in the increasingly liquid control society....

The thing with the Foucauldian model that I alluded to above is that where there is power, there is always resistance: social subjects are produced in and through networks of power relations, but they are not simply produced as unresisting drones/sheeple. Is this specific to disciplinary societies, though? Or are you suggesting that the skills that enable subjects to function in control societies are the same skills which will enable them/us to come up with forms of resistance to control societies? That seems intuitively likely to me, but then it also seems to be a statement in different terms of a Hegelian-progressivist view of education as perfectible through thesis-antithesis-synthesis (each generation critiques the knowledge/skills it was taught by the previous generation and so we march on towards a better future...)

I don't know if that's very coherent. Sorry.
 
 
Sax
11:45 / 24.10.05
I'm not totally convinced children should be allowed to create their own curricula. To a point, I suppose, yes. But when I was 13 I was convinced I wanted to work in science, specifically bio-chemistry. I impressed the teaching staff at my comprehensive so much with my future plans that I was allowed to take a tailored set of courses which included biology, chemistry and physics, for which I had to drop French O-Level. As convincing as I was, I had absolutely no aptitude for sciences and only wanted to be a bio-chemist because Ted Sallis was one and I idly thought that I'd be able to become, if not a superhero, at the very least a shambling muck monster if I got into bio-chemistry. Then I grew up and realised French would have suited my chosen career of journalism a hell of a lot better. So if children are going to be given more power and freer choices, perhaps their motives need examining properly.

Also, kids should be taught basic plumbing and how to wire a plug - I think practical education is massively under-played and tends to be offered as an option only to less academically minded pupils.
 
 
Saveloy
11:57 / 24.10.05
sdv:

"Finally then - what would I like in the curriculum ? Only those things that help train them to think."

What kind of thing do you have in mind? Could you give us some examples?
 
 
sleazenation
13:24 / 24.10.05
kids should be taught basic plumbing and how to wire a plug...

Isn't it now illegal for non-qualified electricians to attempt to wire plugs? I know other areas of electrical D.I.Y. have recently been outlawed...
 
 
Lurid Archive
13:36 / 24.10.05
I think rather that it should be considered as intentional. That the changes are deliberatly being made in support of specific social and economic structures. I suspect, without sufficient evidence to prove it of course, that once neo-liberal economic and social policies were adopted (a.k.a. globalization) then the curriculum changes were in some sense inevitable. - sdv

Yes, this rings true to me. The difficulty here is that even if a politician, say, genuinely wanted to change this trend in education they would find it quite difficult. And a democratisation of education would likely produce exactly the kind of neo-liberal policies that you rightly oppose. In fact, it is probably the anti-democratic nature of educational institutions that helps them most successfully resist these pressures.

In point of fact I'd like to establish (in the here and now) that the education system across the entirity of the western world is better now than at any time in history.

Yes, I'm happy to accept that.

I still don't like the implication that once students were more alive.

*shrug*. It is a touch patronising of me, but I do think that students' understandable focus on vocation, rather than education - "What good will learning history do me, if want to be an accountant?" - closes them off to what we agree is an unprecedented oppurtunity.

Finally then - what would I like in the curriculum ? Only those things that help train them to think.

But that doesn't help at all! It is far from obvious what "those things" might be, and what type of thinking you mean.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:39 / 24.10.05
Isn't it now illegal for non-qualified electricians to attempt to wire plugs?

Ah, but it wouldn't have to be if children were taught how to do it properly at school.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
14:39 / 24.10.05
I think Deva that I was not really trying to create a fantasy curriculum, just thinking and proposing where we are at the moment... And your understanding seems coherent enough to me.

That the Foucault model contains the assumption that resistance and revolt is an inevitable consequence of human social structures is banal in it's obviousness. (Foucault is after all a heterotopian thinker and not a utopian one) But for what it's worth I would emphasize the Deleuzian side of the model as being more useful, this may simply be a matter of taste, but the implicit Marxism in the concept does enable the proper critique of the conservative view that you called "Hegalian-progressivist", conservative because of it's fundamentally reactive responses to culture and events.

The question of whether the skills that enable subjects to function within control societies are the same skills which will also enable new forms of resistance to develop within control societies -- I think this does not necessarily follow. (I suspect) It is still an open question as to whether immaterial workers will discover it is in their interest to resist the terrible changes that (the) control society is going to impose on them and others. However there is some evidence that new forms of resistence and revolt are developing.

Responses to these changes - can be reactionary (as in the reactionary multitude of islamists and other faiths) or radical (as in the movement of movements)...


Preamble over... and to answer what would be in my phantasy curriculum...

Given that within a society of control, such as this one, the most useful skills that a human being can have is to be able to 'think', it is an essential aspect of all immaterial labor - then it seems to me that a more Socratic education would be most useful. What this entails is (after the banalities of literacy and numeracy); a training in philosophy, science/or/philosophy of science, logic, how to read/watch/analyse cultural artifacts and events (a person without a decent media studies education is doomed), politics and so on into language and communication ... notice the complete absence of 'faith' based thinking - should be banned as completely useless...

The evidence for this is difficult but basically appears to have two axes - Firstly - most current subjects do not encourage new and creative work, they are designed as others have said to 'stifle creativity' and ensure that the person being educated is territorialised - Secondly - there is a high probability that the average immaterial worker will have a minimum of 4 to 5 seperate careers during their working lives, this suggests (even demands) that long term understanding, thought and creativity will be more useful than specialist vocational training, which is always limited to the immediate task in hand.

These axes are the precise fractures that show where the fissures and cracks of resistance will flower and why the curriculum required by the control society is doomed --- it simply can't be built here...(laughs)
 
 
sdv (non-human)
14:51 / 24.10.05
lurid,

i wrote the previous email before reading you note - don't know if it details sufficently... hadn't really thought about justifying the list before trying to do so...

This however does not follow...."...And a democratisation of education would likely produce exactly the kind of neo-liberal policies that you rightly oppose...." It presumes that democratisation results in the kind of authoritarianism that the control society requires, rather than with the very different type that earlier forms of social organisation required.

Those experiments ('politics is an experimental activity' as Deleuze said) in pedagogic practice which attempted to construct more democratic environments seem to suggest something more enlightening than you appear to be believing a democracy can manage...
 
 
Lurid Archive
15:34 / 24.10.05
You are right, sdv, that I am being overly pessimistic. Ultimately, democratisation has to be the way forward, but I am wary that a half hearted attempt will merely produce another expression of the anxiety that parents and students feel - result from the "social and economic structures". This is why I was flagging your use of the word "intentional". In my view, a fair degree of the changes in education are as a result of democratic pressure. Certainly, it is hard to detect any political leadership beyond wanting to cut costs....but then, this is what people seem to want.
 
 
astrojax69
21:22 / 24.10.05
deva i did suggest that schools should be storehouses for society values but i also added that schools should equip children with the capacity and enthusiasm to question their place in that society, so i don't think i was suggesting just maintenance of the status quo.

and like sax, i am very scared of suggestions that children should "possess the curriculum". what a child needs to know and learn [both] are not necessarily known to the child a priori, so how is allowing the child possession of its curriculum going to ensure it receives a full and rich education?

what a child should possess is the freedom to question - so the curriculum and its teaching should not speak down to chidren, rather it should be an open dialogue, but guided by the wisdom of experience. it should produce people who are comfortable with novelty and change yet grounded in the basic tenets of clear thinking, kindness, honesty and an awareness of the intricacies of the social structures in which they find themselves living (they can always choose to leave).
 
 
sdv (non-human)
22:26 / 24.10.05
Lurid/all

Without getting to involved in questioning the notion of democracy, let's just consider that it is predominantly a sociotechnical principle of control. And consequently that it should perhaps be considered, in the light of what you are saying as another control mechanism. Related to those other mechanisms being increasingly used as control mechanisms such as electronic tagging, ASBOs, citizenship and continuous assessment. These are deliberately limited examples but are I elieve useful because of the extent to which we can recognize that democracy and assessment are both control mechanisms.

I think myself that 'democracy' has long remained one of the unquestioned, perhaps unquestionable myths of our society.

A further quote from deleuze seems appropriate - "...people have a strange craving to be motivated, they are always asking for special courses and continuing education; it's their job to discover whose ends these serve..." I'd like to imagine that any fantasy curriculum would be interrogated through this type of concept, in the light of any item on a curriculum being as much a control mechnism as continuous assessment. But note the ambiguity for within the quote there is an implicit reference to resistance, negation and refusal.

When astrojax refers to 'open dialogue' doesn't this raise the spectre of the forced choice ? of the order-words that litter the discourse of all forms of pedagogic practice ? This is of course not necessarily a bad thing, it's probably an essential aspect of good pedagogic practice. But it has been identified as surplus to the requirements of education as a business practice...

ah well it's late... must work...
 
 
sdv (non-human)
06:31 / 25.10.05
rarely has Blair and the rest of the pack of neo-liberals co-operated so well with an argument I'm (re*)presenting...

The description of 'intelligence tests' being used to create 'banded schools' is just so appropriate that I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry...
 
 
diz
10:30 / 25.10.05
Another question: In the car obsessed society of the U.S. should there be a Standardized National Driver's Education system.

I would be inclined to say no, because regional variations in necessary driving skills are so strong that a high degree of local control is preferable. I learned to drive in NYC, where driving instructors and DMV people are fanatically focused on one major skill: parallel parking. That's logical enough, as parallel parking skills are crucial in NYC. I would imagine that sort of thing is less important in, say, Montana.
 
 
illmatic
12:02 / 25.10.05
Sax: I take your point, good post. My view on this is coloured by a lot of reading about free, non-coercive models of education, and I don't have the time at present to attempt to convey their essence effectively. (I'm no doubt influenced somewhat by my own negative experinces in education)

I would say though that the best way to find out you've no aptitude for something is to be given a chance at doing it!

There are lots of student histories in the book I mentioned above, and nauturally the students go through big changes in interest, commitment and aspiration as would be expected. The main thing is they get to pursue their interests as they arise in an atmosphere without pressure and coercion, the whole process seems a lot less guilt led. They're given a degree of autonomy from an early age which seems to breed a lot of self-reliance, confidence and trust in their intelligence and relationship with the learning process.

It may not be for everyone, and we should stand well clear of the tendency to to form idealised systems in our heads - but the main thing I got from reading the book (and otehrs) linked above is that this type of education is certainly no worse - and possibly a hell of a lot better - than what's currently on offer.
 
 
Sax
12:30 / 25.10.05
Oh, I'm by no means defending the current education system, or variations thereof as presented by my mate Tony. I think the issue is that you can't *only* change the education system without examining the far-reaching consequences of what society demands of education with regards to successfully employing the products of the education system after their schooling has finished. With the majority of jobs offered on a qualification-related basis until you actually accrue enough experience to render qualifications pointless, it might be seen as counter-productive to the child's future development and ability to buy food.
 
 
Mirror
21:20 / 25.10.05
the choice should be down to the child and what the child wishes to learn and do

This statement is really problematic for me on a number of levels. First and foremost, by the suggested age of 10 the child has no idea about the vast majority of possibilities available to them. Without this kind of background knowledge there's no way that a child can make a considered and rational choice about what course of study to pursue.

Secondly, I think that if this approach were to be adopted that it would lead to over-specialization very early on and a consequent reduction in the variety of information that the child would be exposed to.

My third problem with this sort of idea is purely technical; the implementation would be hell on the teachers, or if society were to actually pay enough to support this sort of education it would be a major drain without a perceptible gain.

The worst thing i found about education was that the value of certain areas were imposed upon me, i felt forced into learning certain things that i have never ever used in my life, or caused me alot of distress.

Nephilim, are you sure that this was what was being taught, or how? I also can honestly say that I don't think that there's anything I've ever learned that hasn't been useful to me at some point.

I'd add that a key element of the "fantasty" curriculum for me would be the emotional well-being - basic happiness - of the child would be considered as much as part of the curriculum as stuffing them with facts.

You know, this sounds wonderful and all, but the fact is that people, kids especially, are fundamentally lazy. Being forced to work and think, particularly if they're not used to it, makes them unhappy - at least in the short term. In the long term, having no useful skills is far more likely to make them unhappy, so which is it going to be, a little pain early on or a lot of pain later?

I should make this disclaimer - much of my opinion on this topic is formed in response to twenty years of anecdotal evidence from my mother, who is a sixth grade teacher. She's one of those hard-nosed battleaxes of a teacher whose students show great progress in the year that they're with her, but whose disciplinary style has brought a fair number of parents to tears.

That being said, I'd agree that strictly teaching facts that can be recited on standardized tests is relatively useless. What is useful is being taught to research, reason, make and test hypotheses and analyze the results. Particularly in the area of numeracy, I think that the most important thing a person can learn is how to derive formulae from first principles rather than learning them by rote.

The main thing is they get to pursue their interests as they arise in an atmosphere without pressure and coercion, the whole process seems a lot less guilt led. They're given a degree of autonomy from an early age which seems to breed a lot of self-reliance, confidence and trust in their intelligence and relationship with the learning process.

In order to do this, the students have to learn to love learning enough to have and pursue personal interests in the first place. I think that the passive forms of entertainment that predominate in western society today cause a lot of people to expect that they will be provided with interests and opinions instead of having to find and form them independently. As such, education shouldn't necessarily be fun, but it must be rewarding to the students in order to be efficaceous.

So, my fantasy curriculum would involve a lot more goal-directed learning, where the learning process is incidental to the production of something of value. Some of this is starting to happen at the middle school level, where classes take on major projects in technology or environmental issues and must learn what is necessary to accomplish their goals. Designing curricula around such projects is much more difficult than listing the topics to be taught, but I think the results would be worth it.
 
 
Lurid Archive
22:28 / 25.10.05
One of my concerns in this type of debate is that I do wonder if there is any support left for univeral education. People talk about bog standard comprehensives and they send their kids to private schools with the justification that children are too important to make a political point out of. Then there are the religious schools and those who want their children to experience an alternative learning experience.

To an extent, I think all these different justifications can amount to the same thing. So while I think that Illmatic's suggestions are intriguing, and I certainly believe that education could stand an overhaul, I am deeply wary of it. Principally because, as I've said, I think that looking for free,non-coercive forms of education can easily become a way to opt out of the comprehensive system. That way, the political will to support and improve education for all is significantly undermined and the fact that one has a progressive rather than conservative justification for an essentially private education makes little difference.

This is all a bit negative, I realise, but I think it is a genuine and not entirely hypothetical concern.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
06:43 / 26.10.05
From a US based lecturer on a related discussion.... and to open the discussion out a little further: "...the cost of endless assessment is enormous. speaking w/ graduate student in another dept., his loans look to exceed $150,000 when all is said and un/done. this is the long-term gamble of effort to secure a seat in the bureaucracy...."

I offer this as empirical evidence to support the contention that in a society of control the idea of a 'universal', a 'standard education' which all humans go through and is used to support some kind of notion of a unified community is no longer deemed necessary. I agree that this is a matter of concern but not surprising given the new systems of domination that the new society.

What this thead/discussion has shown is that the concept of education as a consumer good is still growing. The available education systems are proliferating because they have to support the socio-economic goals of the society and convince the consumers that this is better than the previous disciplinary structures, done through the ever present critiques of the immediate past (history being disapproved of by ever so postmodern neo-liberals).

So given this what do i think of Illmatic's proposals - it will make a useful addition to the consumer portfolio available in the educational system. In this society that would be the purpose and intent - you buy the education system of choice in an attempt to maintain a socio-economic advantage for your children/young adults. (how many of the list were 'privately' educated since the 1980s ? )...
 
 
sdv (non-human)
06:49 / 26.10.05
goal directed learning.... (yuk) this is a terrible idea given the nature of the society that we all live in.

Another quote from Deleuze "...people have a strange craving to be motivated, they are always asking for special courses and continuing education; it's their job to discover whose ends these serve...just as older people discovered with considerable difficulty who benefitted from discipline..."

Ask who will benefit from goal directed learning ? Surely only the system itself ?
 
 
Mirror
13:26 / 26.10.05
goal directed learning.... (yuk) this is a terrible idea given the nature of the society that we all live in

Perhaps you could elaborate a bit? How is being taught by rote without an immediate application for the subject matter more effective than being forced to learn how to do something (and that said something must be learned to succeed) in pursuit of a goal?
 
 
illmatic
14:10 / 26.10.05
Glad I've got some people interested in this idea. I've got a bit of a cold at present and it seems to have infected my brain as well, so I hope what I post below comes over okay. I was just really surprised the thread had got to the length it had without anyone (apart from Neppillm) even considering that children might be consulted or that it's a worthwhile thing to encourage their autonomy.

Anyhow, firstly, I'm sorry if this sounds like a dismissive cop out but - anyone who's interested in these kind of ideas, even if only from the perspective of critquing them, I'd encourage you to go and do some reading. If you can't get hold of David Gribble's book, please check out some of AS Neill's or John Holt's work, which should be readily availble in libraries etc. A more modern text is Grace Llewllyn's work (Teen Liberation Handbook - there's also an excellent section on self-directed learning in William Wimmsatt's "No More Prisions")

I've found the above thoroughly convincing, though as I said above, I may be a liitle biased because of my own negative experiences in education. This approach isn't a perscriptive model - in the book I've linked above the author visits 18 different schools all around the world, which each have different soloutions to some of the problems you've raised, and all of which are coping with "real world" interface very well, with many of the schools able to report significantly better exam results and university entrance rates than normal schools.

What they have in common seems to me to be a view of human nature and the learning process which goes against the common view - namely that you have to be forced to do anything worthwhile. Mirror seems to have summed this up in a nutshell for me with this quote.

people, kids especially, are fundamentally lazy. Being forced to work and think, particularly if they're not used to it, makes them unhappy - at least in the short term.

I have to say I am in fundamental disagreement with you here. I believe that activity is natural, and part of this activity is curiousity reaching out to and finding out about the world. We can clearly see this in young children. Think about a kid of three, crawling around, exploring with hands, feet and every other part of it's body, experimenting with language, asking "Why? Why? Why?" al the time. My whole point, and the whole point that systems of free education rest on, is asking what happens to this child between the ages of five and sixteen to fundamentally switch them off and make learning such and arduos and difficult process (the "deadening" mentioned by Lurid)? What do we do to them? I would argue it's that that we place them in schools, deprive them of automony, take away the pleasures of movement, play and noise and then give them a load of tasks to do which are - from thier perspective - irrelvant and not understood. The only reason kids are thought of as lazy is because they're not doing what WE want them to do - hell, it's perfectly understandable they put up some resistance, espeically when we consider the coercive violence with which a lot of these tasks are reinforced. I know I would, if someone barged into my workplace and started ordering me around.

I would argue that this process creates an alienation from the child's birthright, the joy of learning, crushes automny and curiousity, and takes away independence and self-reliance. Any approach which moves away from this direction is to celebrated I think.

Also, if anybody thinks I'm talking out of my ass, ask yourself how and why you learn about things. Everyone has the motivation and desire to learn, and we do it in a myriad of ways, the only problem being that so many of us have such a shit time at school, it takes years before we can even approach certain subjects again. One of my reasons for belief in self directed learning is becuase of the incredible amount of learning I've done outside of the educational system. Almost everything I'm now interested in I taught myself, school as such did pretty much nothing. You might argue that I'm more motivated and discliped than a five year old - and in lots of ways, you're right. However, what the five year old has got is an immense resevoir of natural curiousity that should be cherished and celebrated not forced along prescribed channels. Any of the books mentioned above provide inmuerable examples of the process of self-directed learnign in action.

As such, I'm not really arguing for any one "system" to take other from another - I'm more arguing for an inversion of the way we think about learning.
 
 
Cat Chant
14:23 / 26.10.05
[Aside: is John Holt the guy that wrote Why Children Fail? I thought that was an amazing book.]
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:44 / 26.10.05
How are you going to work in an office all day if you've had such a lovely education?

Out of the context of neo-liberal capitalism the education system you're describing sounds lovely illmatic but I think in the context of now school is a very important training ground.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
15:01 / 26.10.05
Mirror - The question of defining a curriculum, an educational practice in terms of being 'goal based' is it seems to me threefold:

firstly - who is setting the goals and whose ideological/discursive agendas does the concept of 'goal directed learning' support ?

secondly - why should we believe that the goals which will always tend towards being vocational goals are necessarily worthwhile. (Note that I am not in any sense criticising anyones auto-didactism, this has value but is not a part of a curriculum).

thirdly - perhaps most importantly it is in line with the general requirements of western societies, to direct educational practice to short term vocational goals. Decided on by human beings who are (probably?) decently motivated but unlikely to ask whose ends these 'goals' support.
 
  

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