Of late I’ve occasionally grumbled about education reform here in the United States. Given the sort of readership I have, I suspect that some look at me sidelong when I go on these rants wondering why I get so worked up. After all, there are much sexier issues to discuss like global capitalism and empire. Nonetheless, I think the No Child Left Behind act has been an unmitigated disaster and I am filled with cold chills whenever I think about it. I wish some talented Foucaultian would come along– you know the type, those that don’t simply talk about what Foucault himself wrote, but continue the project of rigorously studying forms and organizations of institutional power such as, perhaps, the way the DSM-IV functions and so on –and analyze the sorts of subjectivizations produced as a result of these agendas. These are the contemporary forms of micropower. Are they being studied and strategized?
What will the minds of Americans be like ten or fifteen years from now, after these children have grown up and entered the work world? Apparently this movement isn’t restricted to the secondary schools, but now there are entire groups of university administrators who believe this would be a good idea at the college level as well. In my cynicism I might not be surprised to hear of community or junior college administors pursuing such reform… But administrators at four year institutions with graduate programs? Now whenever I hear some well meaning person speak of “rubrics” and “performance outcomes” I shiver and dig my heels in, terrified that this is what is lurking right around the corner. I have a dirty confession to make: I passionately believe in traditional liberal arts education and the formation of critical thinkers that do not simply repeat but that are capable of posing problems and creatively generating solutions. The aim of pedagogy should be the formation of free men and women or self-directing agents. This is not accomplished by producing good test-takers. Indeed, listening to the horror stories of the pressures that are placed on students to perform well on these tests, it’s difficult to escape the impression that the very aim of this program is to thoroughly destroy any love of learning so that we might have a perfectly docile populace. The minute I hear words like “rubrics” and “performance outcomes” I suspect that the person using them has little or no understanding of what pedagogy is. At any rate, if you’re in the mood to be outraged, read this and this.
These are prime examples of what I have in mind when I speak of forms of action and policy arising out of stupidity, where the dimension of mediation has been ignored. In the development of this legislation teachers have systematically been cut out of the process as there’s been a working assumption that teachers are the problem and that the businessmen and lawyers that make up Congress know better what is required of education than those who teach. The first stupidity then lies in reducing education to a simple exchange of information, memorization, or “facts”. The second lies in the belief that the source of our education problems are the result of poor teachers. In both cases these are the results of “thingly thought” that pitches problems in terms of abstract immediacy, failing to appreciate the broader network of relations embodied in its object. I’m thoroughly baffled that parents and teachers everywhere aren’t filling the streets and marching with torches as a result of these disgusting policies. I get so angry thinking about this and what I’m seeing in my classroom from students freshly out of highschool that I can hardly even pull together words to say anything of value on the issue.
Larval Subjects . 
March 12, 2007 at 6:12 am
Ok, I’m outraged. I already thought the education system was a mess, but teaching to the test and the “school as a prison” approach have both been growing rapidly in this country.
We have utterly lost the notion of education that creates citizens.
If you need to produce people who think, question, and act, you structure schools differently.
We need to abolish this obsessive need to test. We then need to establish a real hunger for precisely the kind of liberal arts education you call for.
It is nothing to confess.
It is something to trumpet!
March 12, 2007 at 7:54 am
Judith Butler apperently took on the Gender Identity Disorder section of the DSM IV in Undoing Gender. Small consolation, I’m sure.
Every teacher I know is outraged by NCLB, but teachers and teachers’ unions have been rendered absolutely powerless by the same abject idiots that brought us NCLB. As in, it’s illegal for teachers to strike for better working conditions, let alone to protest policy. And ironically, the thing many districts find most objectionable about NCLB isn’t the negative impact it has on education or the way it casts teachers as defective, but the fact that it’s an unfunded mandate.
I’ve long abandoned any notion of history as teleological. I’m beginning to work out a model in which history describes conflict arising from stupid responses to misconstrued but nevertheless inherently stupid propositions.
March 12, 2007 at 8:50 pm
PREACH ON. seriously we are in danger. This coupled with the breakdown of law – in terms of traditional contractual law – and what is being revealed in the latest Justice Dept. scandal with federal judges. We have a growing population of people who have not even basic critical thinking skills, much less innovators. I’m going to guess that the teacher’s union is in the position of the remaining unions – focused on preserving jobs – period.
March 12, 2007 at 8:51 pm
and this is directly related to empire
March 12, 2007 at 11:45 pm
This is a remarkably important topic. Glad to see it here. I have a research project planned for this summer/early fall that will tackle the education reform technologies we’ve seen in American legislation in the past few years. NCLB will be central. By the way, the teachers in my family have similar or worse things to say about that initiative than those in the Post article you cite.
Highlowbetween – The breakdown of traditional contract-based law (the classical liberal model) happened a long time ago. Around the New Deal. What we have now is an elaborate system of literary devices that judges employ in real-life scenarios (this is only one way to put it, but I think many in the legal world would agree with the substance of that assertion). Even the bedrock of the judicial system – stare decisis – has eroded over the past, say, 30 or 40 years with the advent of de-publishing of judicial opinions (de-publishing entails that the decision lacks precedent for later fact patterns).
March 13, 2007 at 12:06 am
Don’t worry about the university going the way of no child left behind. Four-year colleges are busy embracing the customer service model with the instructor and support staff serving as customer service representatives while the student enjoys the role of the choosey shopper looking for a comfortable fit and agreeable sales people who know their place.
March 13, 2007 at 1:20 am
I’ve heard the same things from teachers. Kyle, I very much look forward to hearing more about your research project. Dr. X, gee thanks, now I’m even more depressed! You are, however, absolutely right. You should hear the things coming down the pike from the Texas state legislature pertaining to “retention rates”. This is not simply at the community college level, but at the university level as well. What astounds me about all these teachers have not organized in protest and started leveraging pressure against Congress using the press.
March 13, 2007 at 2:09 am
I’m surprised about the lack of an organized protest too. Two thoughts on that: 1. As evidenced by the administrator who would speak only on condition of anonymity, the exertion of state force is overwhelming to the teaching communities (at the K-12 level). There is a serious fear here. To cite anecdotal evidence, my brother, a middle school teacher, says that the entire faculty loathes the fact that teaching is “not what it used to be,” not in some nostalgic sense but in the sense that it is something fundamentally at odds with the ethos that they as a community accept and desire to embody; they are all vocational-technical arms of the state now, teaching the trade of standardized testing. 2. The scholarly literature on reform is shockingly docile (not exactly in Foucault’s sense – the teachers themselves are becoming so, however), at least in the law journals. There is a lot of irony and distrust, and general dissatisfaction about the legislation and practice it entails, but almost no constructive effort to speak of. In the legal arena, no one is (or very few are) thinking about this seriously.
March 15, 2007 at 9:20 am
I’m in the UK where we have “Every Child Matters”, which on the surface is a bit better (citizenship is an important part of New Labour’s ECM agenda). However, I find myself in the belief that one of the root causes of the turn towards fundamentalism (esp. amongst poor 2nd generation Asian youth) is precisely the lack of a liberal arts education. I’m currently working on beginning some sort of youth programme in my local community outside of mainstream education to see how this issue can be addressed.
March 20, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I agree completely with this critique; this is a topic that is very important to me as well.
One thing that I would caution against, from the comments, is the idea that American education was at some previous point better than this. Maybe in some ways it was, but in terms of the model that Sinthome proposes here, it has never been anything close — and I’m not convinced it was ever even intended to be. Genuine public education is still in our future.
August 23, 2007 at 1:29 pm
[…] of this puts me in mind of the Larval Subject manifesto: I have a dirty confession to make: I passionately believe in traditional liberal arts education […]