Patrick
Shannon -- Penn State University
In
a recent article in Language Arts (July 2001), a professional journal
for elementary school educators, Curt Dudley-Marling and Sharon Murphy discuss
the tightening of regulation of elementary teachers’ lives in school around the
issue of reading instruction. Similar
to other recent authors (e.g., Coles, 2001; Strauss, 2001; ), they contrast the
best efforts of teachers from the 1980s and early 90s (when there seemed to be
opportunity for teachers to compose curriculum and improvise) against the
current enthusiasm for compelling teachers to stick to scripts for reading
instruction that others have prepared for them. They describe several ways in which businesses have ventured into
schools creating markets and looking for efficiencies. They report that business has transformed
different literacies into commodities for students to acquire in order to
increase their market value later when seeking employment. And finally, they explain how government
officials and policies at the state and federal levels are complicit in giving
reading programs ‘the business.’
Dudley-Marling and Murphy lament these changes and call for teachers to
become political in order to oppose this business-like insurgence.
Most progressive educators can agree
with the authors’ description of what’s happening to teachers in elementary
schools across the United States.
Perhaps these progressives can appreciate the authors’ efforts to help
teachers understand how the politics of these events transpire beyond their
school buildings. Some may even
recognize the Marxian foundation of the argument which points toward economics
as the rationale of these reforms.
Unfortunately, Dudley-Marling and Murphy do not make explicit links
between their concerns and Marxist analyses, severely limiting the
possibilities of teachers marshaling effective resistance to business
encroachment into their school lives.
In this brief paper, I make two of these links explicit and offer some
explicit suggestions about what becoming political might entail (See Shannon,
1992; 2001 for an elaboration on the latter point.)
Dudley-Marling’s
and Murphy’s concerns about reading instruction are not new. The current efforts to make reading
instruction more efficient and effective through business principles began
nearly a hundred years ago during the ‘progressive” era. At the same time that Congress was passing
laws to curb the excessive behaviors of business (e.g., the Meat Inspection
Act, the Hepburn Act to regulate the railroads, and the Mann-Elkins Act placing
telephone and telegraph companies under the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce
Commission), government officials, journalists, and professional organizations
found business management plans irresistible.
They become enamored with industries capability to produce goods
cheaply,; with their abilities to forge technological solutions of industrial
problems; and with the power of a few industrialists to amass huge
fortunes. Celebrated by the media,
these industrialists urged all social institutions to adopt business principles
of economy and technology. If they
would, the industrialist promised more social efficiency and great prosperity
for all. This mindset has directed the
education of school personnel, the planning and organization of schools, and
the expectations of the public since that time (Apple, 2000; Callahan, 1965,
Curti, 1935, Giroux, 1983).
The efficiency movement in reading
instruction began during the first two decades of the twentieth century
(Shannon, 1989). “Primarily schooling
is a problem of economy; it seeks to determine in what manner the working unit
may be made to return the largest dividend upon the material investment of
time, energy, and money” (Bagley, 1911,
p. 2). Beginning in 1914, the National
Society for the Study of Education’s Committee for the Economy of Time in
Education applied means/ends rationality to all elementary school subjects,
culminating in three reports in 1919 (Principles of Methods in - 1. Teaching
Writing, 2. Teaching Spelling, and 3. Teaching Reading -- as Derived from
Scientific Investigation). These
reports offered rules for the design and practice of curriculum and instruction
in elementary schools. Curriculum was
set as testable skills with speed and accuracy as the primary criteria for
success.
During the 1920s, textbook
publishers combined these rules for efficient curriculum with E. L. Thorndike’s
laws of learning to establish the basal reading series -- a set of graded
anthologies, practice books of skills for students, and teacher’s manuals for
the correct use of the anthologies and teaching of skills. Basals became the official technology of
reading instruction that would standardize teachers’ practices according to
scientific principles in order to ensure efficiency in and control over the
quality of student learning. The teacher’s manuals listed the skills to be taught
in order to ensure readiness, the workbook guaranteed skill exercise, and the
correct answers supplied in teacher’s manuals encouraged teachers to reinforce
students’ accurate responses. Since the
1920s, most teachers and administrators have accepted basal teacher’s manuals
as the correct stimulus to evoke the appropriate standard response from
teachers in order to ensure that students received businesslike, scientific
instruction. In fact, many state education departments and school districts
mandated their use. In a survey
during the 1960s (Austin and Morrison), 95 percent of elementary school
teachers acknowledged that they used basal materials to direct all of their
reading instruction. According to a
National Assessment of Educational Progress in 1994, students reported that 80
percent of elementary teachers used commercially produced instructional
materials to drive their instruction.
Across the century, programmed learning, criterion referenced testing,
mastery learning, teacher and school effectiveness, and now curriculum
standards and high stakes testing have been proposed as variations on the theme
of ensuring that teachers follow the prescribed teacher guides closely in order
to make the outcomes of their instruction more predictable and less dependent
on teachers.
Compelling Teachers to
Follow Scripts
Marxist
thought can help us to understand the reasons behind the proliferation of
business practices in reading programs and comprehend teachers’ apparent
welcoming of these practices. Both are
expected consequences of the expansion of the capitalist economic system. The “rationalization” of reading instruction
is only part of the spread of capitalist logic throughout public and private
life. According to this logic in order
to reduce the risk to capital and to maximize profits, all aspects of business
must become predictable. This is not as
easy as it might seem because people, raw materials, the environment and
capital are involved in production. At
one time and by some people, each of these contributors were invested with
religious significance. In order to
make production predictable and profitable, capitalism exploits the Christian
and the Enlightenment’s “disenchantment” of nature, separating feelings and
spirits from raw materials and the environment. Moreover, capitalism posits that work is a rational process
devoid of spirituality and emotion, which can become more productive if
organized accordingly. These two steps
render the dissimilar (people, the environment, and artifacts) comparable
according to abstract, value-free laws (both physical and human). In this way, raw materials, the environment,
and workers become simply factors in the planning and organization of
production -- none of which require any special consideration or
treatment. (It is the application of
this logic that allows educational policy analyst, Diane Ravitch to exclaim “teachers
don’t need creativity...Teachers need to use methods that have proved
successful” (as quoted in Morse, 2000.)
Accordingly, capitalist logic promises that if all of society could be
organized in a similar fashion, then society would run like a business,
creating the best conditions for production, technological advance and
accumulation. The allure of this
promise drives the efforts to rationalize more and more aspect of public and
private live.
Accordingly
modern institutions, social norms, and even individual actions are developed
and judged according to uncaring scientific and meritocratic business
principles in order that they can be entered safely as factors into the
calculus of modern life. Hierarchical
relationships of authority, means/ends analyses, and continuous regulation are
intended to ensure this predictability in institutions and everyday
matters.. Rationalization, then, treats
human beings as variables to be manipulate along with materials, time, and
space to ensure predictable products and profits from material, ideational or
social manufacturing. Marcuse describes
the human consequences of this rationalization:
The private and public bureaucracy thus emerges on an
apparently objective and impersonal ground, provided by the rational
specialization of function...For, the more the individual functions are
divided, fixated, and synchronized according to objective and impersonal
pattern, the less reasonable it is for the individual to withdraw and
withstand. The material fate of the
masses becomes increasingly dependent upon the continuous and correct
functioning of the increasingly bureaucratic order of private capitalist
organizations. The objective and
impersonal character of rationalization bestows upon the bureaucratic groups
the universal dignity of reason. The
rationality embodied in the giant enterprises makes it appear as if men, in
obeying them, obey the dictum of an objective rationality. The private bureaucracy fosters a delusive
harmony between the special and the common interests. Private power relationships appear not only as relationships
between objective things but also as the rule of rationality itself (1941, p.
151)
The conditions of life in contemporary elementary
schools provide an example of this rationalization process. The justification for scripted lessons and
high stakes testing is the logic of production. Scripts provide the division of function with teachers becoming
factors in the implementation of the curricular designs of others; they fix the
actions of teachers across classroom, schools, and districts; and they
synchronize the actions of teachers and students toward the abstracted exchange
value of student test scores. These
scores now define teachers’ success, become students’ cultural capital,
legitimize administrators’ plans, and raise property values in
communities. Using science as the
objective and impersonal logic behind the rationalization of reading
instruction in elementary schools (See Edmondson and Shannon, in press), the
entire process appears natural and inevitable.
Inside the logic of rationalized reading programs it makes sense to
follow the scripts in order to increase the chances of higher test scores, and
few inside or outside of elementary schools object to the rationalization of
reading instruction. Those that do
object are dismissed as irrational or political (See Pressley, 1994). According to Marxist theory, then, the
scripted programs for reading instruction are simply an expression of
capitalist logic.
Marxist
theory also helps us to understand why so many individuals -- teachers,
administrators, and taxpayers -- accepted the rationalization. Within attempts to secure student learning
through the specialization of teaching functions, individuals lose sight of the
human process of teaching and learning (and the scientific study of same). Teachers’ work, teaching, and students’
work, learning,- once the very expression and incorporation of their generic
being, now confronts them as things apart, indeed as things that command them
as property. The scripted programs
confront the teachers and the test scores confront the learners. Marx calls this alienation - the
subordination of the worker to the reified product of his labor. The dialectic between reification and
alienation helps explain why teachers become complicit in the rationalization
of reading instruction and provide a more specific definition of what becoming
political might mean.
Reification
is the treatment of an abstraction as a concrete object or an immutable
procedure. Many teachers,
administrators, and taxpayers reify the many possible ways of teaching others
to read as the systematic application of the scripted commercial materials and
programs. History, educational experts,
and business encourage this reification, making these commodities the tools of
teaching and learning reading. The
scripted programs are produced commercially and objectively without any regard
for the emotional and social context of any particular classroom, far from the
daily practices of teachers and students.
With teachers’ work divided, fixated, and synchronized within a
rationalized logic, they become one of many factor in teaching students to
read. Teaching without basal
commodities, then, appears to be the irrational act because the manufacturers
of the programs promote their product as the embodiment of scientific
investigations as they have for nearly a century. Evidence that teachers have internalized this logic comes from
teachers and schools districts which exchange one scripted program for another
when they find that their students still do not learn to read in a timely
fashion. Reification has at least three
consequence/causes: first when they
reify reading instruction, teachers and administrators lose sight of the fact
that reading instruction is a human process; second, reification of the
scientific study of reading instruction as the commercial programs means that
their knowledge of reading and instruction is frozen in a single technological
form, and third the reification of learning as test scores requires that they
define their work simply as the efficient and effective delivery of this closed
system.
Alienation
is the process of separation between people and some quality assumed to be
related to them in natural circumstances.
This process can be consciously recognized (subjective alienation) or be
beyond the control of the individual (objective alienation). If you begin with the assumption that
reading, teaching and learning are human processes, which are natural qualities
of teachers and students, then, the rationalization of reading instruction
requires both types of alienation. The
script’s standardization of teachers’ actions requires that the totality of
teaching someone to read is “divided, fixated and synchronized”, objectively
separating teachers from teaching reading.
The definition of learning as test scores separates students from the
totality of their learning. Reducing
teachers and students to factors in the scripted system of test score
production requires that they lose, at least officially, emotional, cultural,
and social attachments to the process of teaching and learning and to each other. Such detachments demand a subjective
separation of teachers from teaching and students from learning. This does not mean that alienated teachers
are uncaring or that alienated students lack engagement. Rather it means that the nature of that engagement
is subsumed under the process of rationalization and the possibilities of
teaching and learning are artificially directed and severally restricted.
A
Marxist reading of the current conditions of reading instruction in elementary
schools suggests that capitalist rationalization continues to increase its
control of teachers’ and students’ lives through the processes of reification
and alienation. These conditions are
not unique to reading instruction or schools as rationalization of public and
private life are a consequence of the expansion of capitalism. In these terms, teachers’ attempts to
compose curriculum and to improvise as teachers are a direct rejection of
rationalization, the consequent reification of reading instruction, and their
objective alienation from their work as teachers. Teachers who compose and improvise, in fact, appear to be in
pursuit of the goal of Marx’s historical project -- to secure the conditions
that would allow, encourage, and support the “universal right to be freely active,
to affirm ourselves, to be spontaneous in our activity, and to pursue the free
development of our physical and mental energy”
(1844/1956, p. 75).
During the 1990s as the possibilities of composing
new curricula and improving new relationships among teachers and students and
between both and society grew, these teachers and those who led them should
have expected reactions from the forces of rationalization. And the “empire” did strike back. First textbook publishers absorbed the
rhetoric of composition and improvisation into their scripted programs and the
state assimilated these teaching processes without making any accommodations
for these practices in the expected tested outcomes. Simultaneously, philanthropic organizations brokered a consensus
that these changes in teaching threatened not only the future of current
students, but the economic future of the country as well. Business leaders chimed in that they couldn’t
find skilled workers for the high wage/high skill jobs they had open. With this consensus, government officials
called for the reestablishment of standards and accountabilities, and then,
funded research to prove the need for both.
Now they are offering under-funded schools financial incentives to
comply. Many educational psychologists
were quick to the funding trough, providing scientific reports discrediting
composed curricula and improvised teaching..
These readjustments to restore rationality in schools were accompanied
by renewed reification of scientific inquiry and reading instruction as
scripted programs and reinforced alienation of teachers from their work.
Because
literacy (however defined) is valued as a cultural, social, and economic
possession -- one that gives its owner a head start in the race for success
within groups and society -- corporations, companies, and individual
entrepreneurs have produced literacy (or part of it) as a commodity (See
Shannon, 2000 for a more elaborate treatment of the commercialization of
reading and reading education.).
Because there are several alternative definitions of literacy and
differing conceptions of its value, many literacy commodities have been
produced from which we can choose. And
we have purchased those commodities to either enhance our own cultural, social,
and economic capital (computer literacy, anyone?) or to increase the same for
our children. In this sense, we acquire
literacy as a commodity in order to improve our value as a cultural, social or
economic commodity ourselves. This is
the crux of Dudley-Marling and Murphy’s concern about the commodification of
literacy and learners. The forces of
rationalization have turned reading and readers into things for sale. Marxist theory can provide a deeper
understanding of how this happens and the likely consequences of literacy for
sale.
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist
mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of
commodities -- its unit being a
single commodity.
Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a
commodity (Marx, 1967, p.35) A
commodity appears to be just an object, a thing. That thing has a double nature, however. That is, it has use-value (bringing utility
and/or pleasure to people) and exchange-value (commanding other objects or
money in transactions of daily life).
While use-values are a product of both labor and nature (social and
physical entities), exchange values are purely social constructs established as
ratios of comparable labor among the objects to be exchanged. To make labor comparable across commodities,
it must be reduced to a common kind, as undifferentiated and measurable as any
other thing involved in commercial production.
The human activity of work then must be separated from personal
expression or development (the disenchantment) in order to become one of many
comparable factors to be considered in the manufacture of things for sale. This need for “abstract” labor requires a
particular set of circumstances in which profit is the highest priority in the
production of commodities.
That
set of circumstances, capitalism, organizes production in such a way to reduce
costs of production to a minimum (in order to maximize profits). This profit motive impels capitalist
manufacturers to rationalize production - seeking a division of labor -- a
historically specific method of reducing individualized and differentiated work
into routine and regular acts, creating new efficiencies. The profit drive, then, creates the powerful
forces to homogenize labor and to simplify its form in order to imbue the
commodity with the capacity for exchange.
Under capitalism, even labor becomes a commodity -- a thing that
individuals possess, develop, and sell in order to survive, and perhaps,
thrive. Despite their simple appearance
as objects, commodities represent all these invisible social relationships.
Marx
called the invisibility of these relationships “the fetishism of commodities”
(the extension of reification). By this
he meant that we lose sight of the social character of commodities and act as
if the physical properties of the commodity command a price. Many, even some economists, believe that the
thing itself has the power to establish an object’s price and to be productive,
and not the human labor or the social construction of exchange value. Marx wrote, a “definite social relation
between men themselves…assumes…the fantastic form of a relation between things”
(1967, 165). Capitalism’s moral
character is based on this fetishism of commodities -- this distortion of
reality to make profit off of the work of others.
The
confusion between this social right and the physical reality of productivity --
a central part of the fetishism -- obscures the workings of capitalism from
public view. It appears that the things
are being remunerated with profits for their contribution and not their owners
who are accumulating profits. In a
sense, however, the transfer is an act of stealing. The physical parts of production are transformed from one state
to another, but the surplus value which labor creates (beyond laborers’
remuneration) is taken from the laborers.
Under capitalism, this government-sanctioned robbery is deemed
acceptable (even necessary) by the most precise scientific inquiry -- economics
(Heilbronner, 1985). Through their
research, economists endeavor to understand the nature of the system and to
make its social and personal values seem natural and inevitable among all
citizens. With government and science
behind it, capitalism projects the illusion that it is the natural state of
civilization which we must preserve at all costs -- James Madison’s
interpretation of that famous phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” Once environment, capital, and labor are
transformed in to commodities and those commodities are fetishized, all
opportunities for subversive interpretations of the system disappear.
Each
commodity that we encounter, then, can teach us about capitalism as a socially
constructed, historical system of production.
There is nothing eternal or natural about capitalism (although there are
universals within it and a recognizable order to its system). When we consider “commodification” -- the
transformation of practices, things and ideas into things for sale - we must
remember its social construction, and not just dwell only upon the immediate
appearance and illusion of the new commodity created. The values directing each transformation include the central role
of profits in the structures and practices of our daily life, the rights of
owners of the means of production to all the profits from commodity exchange,
the notion that laborers must be alienated from their work in order to achieve
the highest exchange-value for commodities, and the fact that any thing, one, practice
or idea can become a commodity.
At a
cultural level, commodities represent the values of their manufacturers (Schor,
2000). The thing for sale is an
embodiment of not only the generalized values of capitalism, but also of what
manufacturers want in the world and how they wish to live with others. Manufacturers produce commodities for profit,
of course, but also enter production to make the world better (according to
their vision of better). This may seem
hard to accept with so many apparently cynical commodities on the market
(chocolate cereals, hand guns, cigarettes, Elvis statues). Yet, cereal manufacturers point to the
importance of choice in the development of individuals and to the aid that they
bring to parents who struggle to get their children to eat breakfast. Hand gun producers trot out the second and
fourth amendments to the U. S. Constitution as their moral justification. Each commodity expresses its manufacturer’s
commitment to freedom of choice, to quality of life, and to an ideal of how the
world should work (Lear, 1994). Even
manufacturers who consciously make and sell products they know to be harmful
display their values about how the world should work and their elevated
position in that world. As John Edgar
Widemann (1995) suggested about those who propose barbaric prison conditions,
these manufacturers do not believe that their products or the conditions under
which they are produced are for people like themselves.
To
understand the commercialization of reading instruction, then, we must examine
the commodities offered, the markets created and the values promoted through
the extension of capitalism into elementary schools. Consider the Open Court
reading program published by the Science Research Associates (SRA), which thousands
of schools and school districts have adopted across the United States. Similar to other commercially prepared
reading programs, Open Court provides anthologies of children’s stories, a
scope and sequence of skills to be taught as students work their way through
the anthologies, many forms of practice and assessment of those skills, and a
teacher’s guidebook to direct teachers on how to coordinate the use of all the
materials across each grade level. Open
Court is a scripted program which means that the teacher’s guidebook includes
explicit directions for both teachers and students on what they are to do and
how that are to do it each day of reading instruction. As one California principal reports, Open
Court assures that “what is happening in one class is happening in another...Teachers
work from detailed instructional guides, scripted down to the very examples
they are to write on the board” (Anderluh, 1998, A1). For example, the teacher’s quidebook for Grade 1 opens with these
words:
Choose one or more of the following activities to
focus the children’s attention and to review some of the concepts they have
been learning.
Sound Review:
Name a family spelling card and call on a child to say the sound the
card represents. The child should then
give a word that contains the sound and identify where the sound is heard in
the word. That child then names a new
card and calls on another child to say the new sound and a new word. Continue in this manner.
Identify Rhymes:
Write the three words on the chalkboard,...
The tone and register of these directions continue
throughout the first grade teacher’s guidebook, across the guides for the
practice activities, and through the sixth grade guidebook to the last
lesson. At every moment, it is clear
what teachers should do and who is in charge of the instruction.
At
the beginning of each teacher’s guidebook, SRA lists Open Court’s authors and
prints its mission statement. The
authors of the first grade edition are well known educational psychologists who
have published widely on reading, writing, and instruction. After the authors names, lists of
consultants both university- and school- based are presented to demonstrate
that many educators have looked at the materials and found them worthy. Because Open Court is a commodity it hides
the true producers of the final product.
The authors listed for Open Court wrote few of the stories, lessons,
instructions, practices, or assessments.
They may have written none. What
they did was provide a template of what the skills should be, the order that
made logical sense to them, the format for the lessons, the orientation of the
lessons, and perhaps the modes of assessment.
They negotiated a framework for the program among themselves, and
probably reviewed a selected sample of the finished product. Between their establishment of the framework
and the completed programs, scores of scribes and editors worked on the actual
pages of the Open Court program. That’s
not to mention the layout production and the actual printing crews.
Moreover,
the framework that was negotiated isn’t really the authors’ production. Rather it is an abstracted form of the
lessons that these authors have observed experienced teachers present. This is not to imply that the authors stole
the framework from any one teacher.
They regularized the practices of teachers who they have defined as good
teachers and suggested that SRA package them for other teachers to buy. This intention to sell the lessons reduces
the possible use value of those original lessons that unnamed teachers devised
for their students at a certain time in a certain place. The exchange hides the original use value
and the human labor behind the colorful pages.
This
cloak -- the fetishism of commodities as Marx called it -- makes it seem as if
the materials are responsible for students learning to read. SRA encourages this assumption among
teachers and the public:
Students who experience Collections for Young
Scholars: learn how to read and respond
to a variety of texts; acquire strategies for accessing information and for
explaining concepts from many areas of knowledge including some that do not
even exist today; learn how to communicate effectively using both oral and
written language; learn how to work both independently and collaboratively; and
give sustained effort to thinking and problem solving. (p. 10)
This statement suggests that the scripted program,
and not the interaction of teacher and students around text, produce
learning. Because the lessons are
scripted, teachers are extensions of the program. Because the students’ route through the program is also scripted,
they become extensions of the program as well.
The human essence of reading, teaching, and learning are lost from view.
Although
Open Court may be a more explicit tool in the rationalization of reading
instruction than other basal programs, they are not different in kind. Basal reading programs are commercial
endeavors and must rationalize and carry the social entailments of capitalism
with them into classrooms. The
fetishism of these commodities instantiates a morality that is at odds with the
possibilities of literacy. While
literacy can be domesticating as we see when the teacher reads the scripts, it
can also be liberating, allowing teachers and students to write and read their
own scripts. This language of
possibility is present in SRA’s statement about the powers of their commodity --
the Open Court reading program.
However, the scripts and the rationalized logic behind the scripts
contradict these possibilities -- at least in the classroom. In this way, Open Court allows us to see the
conditions of work in elementary classrooms that restrict both students’ and
teachers’ development because, as Marx explained, each commodity contains the
social relations of capitalism.
In their article, Dudley-Marling and Murphy celebrate
the teachers who resist the consequences of
the past rationalization of reading instruction and call for teachers
and parents to become political concerning the new efforts to rationalize. The authors seek a cultural politics
committed to creating specific forms of schooling that encourage and foster the
realization of differentiated human capacities. This politics requires a dialectical effort to change the minds
and social conditions of teachers, administrators and taxpayers. This is what Marx meant by praxis, the bond
between thinking and doing in which ideas and ideals can only be vindicated and
validated by some kind of activity.
According to Marx, reality is not merely what is, but what we make of
it. Marxist educational praxis,, then,
is intended to provide more than an understanding of politics or schooling or
whatever historical circumstance; it is intended to serve as a guide for making
politics, schooling, history. By
illuminating past and current efforts to rationalize teachers’ and students’
lives, Marxism can help teachers understand the cognitive, social, and physical
structures of the past congealed in the present, opening teachers’ awareness to
unsuspected aspects of their social existence.
A Marxist understanding of rationalization and commodification of
reading instruction changes the terms by which teachers accept the present, and
thereby, changes their abilities to shape the future.
Becoming
political, then, requires that teachers judge all past, present and future
school structures by their moral unfolding, or more precisely, their
orientation toward human freedom.
Inquiry into the structures of reading instruction (or any other
practice) must center on a commitment to the idea of human emancipation. In this way, the contradiction between the
rhetoric of Open Court concerning the possibilities of literacy and the actual
scripted social relations of that reading program which turn teachers and
students into things can serve as an opening for what Roger Simon calls “projects
of possibility”.
I am using the term ëproject’ here in the particular
sense in which it was discussed by Sartre as an activity determined by both
real and present conditions, and conditions still to come which it is trying to
bring into being. In this sense a
project of possibility begins with a critique of current realities. This critique suggests that a contradiction
exists between the openness of human capacities that we encourage in a free
society and the social forms that are provided and within which we must live
our lives. It is this contradiction
which is the starting point for a project of possibility and defines its broad
aim: the transformation of the relation
between human capacities and social forms.
More particularly the project requires both the expansion of forms to
accommodate capacities and the expansion of capacities to make the realization
of new forms possible. Such a project
would reject the resolution of this contradiction between capacities and forms
through narrowing of capacities to fit existing forms or through the narrowing
of forms to fit preconceived, fixed, ënaturalized’ notions of capacities. (Simon, 2001, 141-142)
The social form of Open Court’s tight scripting of
teachers’ and students’ words and actions during reading instruction
contradicts the openness of literacy, teaching, and learning. Despite the talk of higher test scores,
efficient instruction, and systematic learning, the program cannot lead to
human emancipation. Although it may be
argued that the controlled beginning will eventually lead students to greater
futures, this line of reasoning suggests the narrowing of social forms to fit
preconceived, fixed and naturalized notions of what their capacities might be
in the future. Some may overcome the
controlled beginning to use literacy to open opportunities in their lives, but
some will also internalize the process of control, limiting the potential of
their development. And of course, the
scripted lives are all there is offered to teachers. Neither teacher nor students is likely to make possible the
realization of a variety of differentiated human capacities.
This
contradiction does not lie in the scripts themselves, but in the forces of
rationalization which attempt to standardize reading programs in order to make
them predictable factors in the productive industrial equations. Those forces rely on the reification of all
possible social structures and means for teaching reading as the commercially
produced, scientifically validated scripted programs. Rationalization and reification result in the alienation of
teachers from their work and their students because the fetishism of the
commodified programs makes it appear as if the materials are the agents of
teaching and learning. Similar
contradictions can be found in more and more aspects of our public and private
lives, all of which have been rationalized in order to ensure that capitalism
endures and expands. In this way, the
composers and innovators in education are linked with the composers and
innovators in other fields of work -- child care and health care workers,
agricultural workers, service workers, and many others.
Teachers
becoming political from a Marxian standpoint means raising our own and others’
consciousness about the root causes of scripted lessons, high stakes testing,
and commercialization of schools and schooling. This is by no means an easy task because the structures of
rationalization and commodification are cognitive, social, and physical. Those cognitive structures weigh heavily on
even the innovative teacher. Harder
still may be learning to act in conjunction with other workers suffering under
increased pressures of rationalization in their work. Until those alliances are made, the chances for effective
politics in education are limited. To
really address Dudley-Marling’s and Murphy’s concerns, and not continue to
stagger from opposition of one rationalized solution to another, we must stop
the unmediated expansion of capitalism into social institutions that should be
in the business of human emancipation (See Shannon, 1998 for an elaboration on
this point). This means teachers should
join the movements toward livable minimum wages, national health insurance,
affordable housing, and repeal of NAFTA and GATT. They should make their presence know at the protests of the World
Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. These are large projects of possibility that
show promise on a large scale.
On a
smaller scale, the local, state and national movements concerning high stakes
testing are projects of possibility.
Attempts to incorporate choice about methods at a district and school
level keeps open the possibilities of reading instruction, allowing at least
some composition of curricula and innovation in teaching. Wrestling control of time away from
forty-two minute periods and 180 day grade levels and space away from isolated rooms
and individual desks undercuts the standardization of reading instruction. Working with other adults (parents,
custodians, librarians, local business owners, etc.) as co-teachers expands the
possibilities of literacy and learning for all involved. Each of these acts rejects the rationalization
of schools, the reification of reading instruction and science, and the
alienation of teachers from their teaching and students from their
learning. Each is direct by a
commitment to human emancipation.
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