“…the possibilities of what drawing is and the contexts in which it flourishes. Farthing engaged in something of a taxonomy of drawing, pushing the audience to consider the “outer extremities” of the practice, as Burton describes it. Showing an image of a plane taking off and casting a shadow, Farthing asked, “Is the pilot drawing on the ground?” As Moffett (a pilot himself) extends it, “Imagine the pilot as drawing lines of flight through space. If we want to call flying drawing, do so and see what that allows.”

The most avidly questioned panelist was Neil Shah, a British surgeon who demonstrated how medical doctors draw out their operations. “Scientists work the forefront of imagination and investigation. They need to draw because sometime that’s the only way to represent a thought,” Burton explains.”

“It is very foolish to tell lies; for, soon or late they are found out; and it is very mean and wicked. God himself has said, that we must not lie; that he abhors liars, and that he will punish them. Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for telling lies.”

I’m just saying, kids…

If this is the prime ideological context for education in this country, then ironically the call for rigorous education is couched in the most un-rigorous of dreams. Rigor is merely de rigour: a question of etiquette and protocol.

Education as the diplomatic extension of war. The Luke-warm War, we could call it.

Interestingly, Larry Cuban, takes an alternative tack. Instead of pushing into the absurdity of the competitive drive, he simply decouples its educational assumption. Just because we want to stay ahead, doesn’t mean more education is the answer:

Presidents H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have sought national goals such “common core” standards so that the U.S. would be better able to compete with Asian and European for global markets. Now, President Obama has reaffirmed that goal. In a talk to the nation’s governors he said:

“[Asian nations] want their kids to excel because they understand that whichever country out-educates the other is going to out-compete us in the future. So that’s what we’re up against. That’s what’s at stake -– nothing less than our primacy in the world…. And I want to commend all of you for acting collectively through the National Governors Association to develop common academic standards that will better position our students for success.”

The link between more and rigorous schooling–everyone goes to college–and enhanced economic competitiveness is gospel among both political conservatives and liberals. Since the 1970s, The mantra of “human capital” preached by economists and adopted by national and state policymakers of both political parties as biblical truth depends upon correlational evidence–lifetime earnings associated with level of formal schooling. Seldom do the facts of a largely knowledge- and service-driven labor market enter policymaker debates . For example, in a technology-dependent economy, 70 percent of current jobs require only a high school diploma. Twenty percent require a bachelor’s degree and only 10 percent need technical training.

Does this leave our dream intact, and just call for a rethinking of the numbers? Or does showing the un-grounded nature of the dream itself ask us to reevaluate why we find the narrative so compelling?

Or is it more difficult than that: is it the call for rigor that is operative, which is precisely in opposition to any rigor achieved? We must keep ourselves busy. In this case, the most radical proposition would be that we don’t even want to keep ahead of the world, we just want to not have to think about what we are doing in the name of education. This would be the more elusive danger.

I am reminded of the joke about the farmer who refuses to lend his neighbor a rope because, he claims, he is using it to tie up his milk. The neighbor points out how absurd that is, to which the farmer responds, “Maybe, but if I don’t want to lend you the rope, one excuse is as good as another.”

The joke, of course is that you aren’t supposed to say that to the person’s face. It is de rigour to at least come up with a reasonable sounding excuse. But the truth is that we hardly want to be bothered.  In this sense, pointing out the absurdity of logic changes nothing. Whether we are using our rigor to tie up milk or not hardly matters, what we prefer is not to have to come up with a good use for it. In that case, the real joke is not that we have said the unsayable at the expense of the neighbor, showing competition to trump reason.

The joke is instead that the neighbor is our excuse for why we rigorously tie up our milk. The neighbor is expendable, but as a necessary expense to cover up the absurdity that the tying of milk is essential.

I’ve recently discovered that the After Ed blog has a short video of Diane Ravitch discussing her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. (See below.)
It’s worth taking a look.
Not because of the content, which is much better served by reading the book, but as an exercise in positioning.
Now having the benefit of an actual response to the book’s provocative change of position, (which I wrote about here), Ravitch is better able to do what she does so well: place all the ideo-political reactions in the same camp with the fanciful promises of quick fixes.
Mind you, I agree with her about the shell game at work around choice. Her research is illuminating.
What the video condenses is the stance: everyone gets caught up in the distractions of the moment, while education itself is slow, incremental (neutral) work. Standing in the middle, Ravitch finds herself backed by teachers.
This strikes me as reasonable (if perhaps a bit self-elected): in-service teachers are hard pinched by the shifting terrain, often wishing they could just get on with the day to day teaching they feel comfortable with.
But isn’t this also a bit of a false choice? Reactionary politics vs. slow and neutral education. And where are the students in all of this? Not forgotten, I’m sure, but perhaps busy.