Since the rise of settled societies some eight to ten thousand years ago the majority of the world's population have lived in conditions of grinding poverty...However in the last two hundred years a sizeable minority of the world's population has achieved a material standard of living that would have been unimaginable for previous generations. But this relatively sudden and recent improvement has been obtained at a significant price -- a vast increase in materials, widespread pollution from the industrial processes involved and a variety of social problems.

In addition, it has raised major questions of equity about the distribution of wealth within individual countries and about the comparative standards of living in the industrialized world and the Third World. (p. 315)

-Clive Ponting, from Green History of the World

Against the will of its leaders, technology has changed human beings from children into persons. However, every advance in individuation of this kind took place at the expense of the individuality in whose name it occured, so that nothing was left but the resolve to pursue one's own particular purpose... The only reason why the culture industry can deal so successfully with individuality is that the latter has always reproduced the fragility of society. (p. 155)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, from Dialectic of Enlightenment

The above quotes represent an overall context which frames what I wish to achieve in this introduction, namely, how I came to do an ethnography of an American urban educational setting in the context of the present period of human history.

If we were to comment upon our present-day society as if from an "outside" perspective, the perspective some recommend as appropriate for an ethnography, we would first have to comment upon the relative state of industry of the society of the present day as compared with the historical conditions of industry. Never before has industry so blanketed the land as it does today (especially given its position as a barometer of "progress" within industrial discourse), and the main marvel of aerial urban photography is that it reveals the fact of human domination of the landscape. But it is not merely the landscape that is changed by industrialization; it is also the culture of modern society that has become tied to the industrial process, even though its members cling (sometimes rabidly) to non-industrial conceptualizations of themselves through the vehicles of religion and cultural identity. The unspoken presuppositions that form what we call normality, the taken-for-granteds that Jurgen Habermas, via Edmund Husserl, named as the "lifeworld" (Habermas 1984), are bound together with industrialized ways of getting what we want from the world. This, philosophers will remember, was what the later Heidegger criticized about modernity, that it created a realm of technologically-inspired taken-for-granted convenience.

Now this binding of technology with the lifeworld has been made possible, as sociologists since Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) have known, by a certain configuration of the rules of society, buttressed by a certain "ethic" or discursive formation if you will. For the most part, then, discourse about society's rules, about politics and power, has in the modern era of industry been pervaded with the relationship of people to the primary industrial processes, which are 1) production and 2) consumption. More specifically, political discourse concerns itself today with justifications of who deserves to consume what and who should be obligated to produce what, within the confines of what sort of industrial system. Behind the prominent labels carried by political issues exists this taken-for-granted reality; debates about welfare engage the rhetoric of "forcing people to work," gun ownership is about the right to consume guns, ammunition etc., drug policy is about the moral status of drug consumption, education policy is about requiring students to do a certain kind of work and consume a certain kind of educational product, etc. etc.

Within the realm of political rhetoric, there are elitist discourses, that would privilege a certain class of humanity as deserving a monopoly of power over the above concerns, and egalitarian discourses, which presuppose a hypothetical ideal world where everyone consumes and produces in some "equal" way. It must be observed here that the ideological debate between various representations of either or both of these two discourse types underlies the various political conflicts of the present day. Neither discursive type really comes to doubt, however, the necessity of the production processes themselves, even though such processes are problematic when viewed from the standpoint of a generalized concern with humanity, as Clive Ponting points out in the above quote.

Therefore, we can thus re-observe, as Horkheimer and Adorno observed in Dialectic of Enlightenment above, the power of the industrial process over politics, culture, and people themselves. The cultural glue that defines the interwoven relationships of the society of the present is pervaded, even though such glue may vary subtly and vastly from cultural site to cultural site across the globe, by industrial processes. What Horkheimer and Adorno are observing in the above quote, however, is something about the status of people as they "come into society." The people, observe Horkheimer and Adorno, are no longer mere children to be placed in the custody of the nobility or of sovereign monarchs; but today this social form has been replaced by a mass society that merely "follows its own purpose" in a way that can be controlled by the culture industry (through advertising, marketing, economic compulsion etc.), that is to say by the industrialization of the lifeworld by technology in the hands of big business. Thus the transformation of people from children into persons, the genesis of responsible individuals within democracy that is, has never really created a society of exemplars of individuality, but rather instead it has created "the masses."

Perhaps this industrialization of the lifeworld is nowhere more plain and evident that in southern California, the wealthy, over-suburbanized media center of America (a nation of consumers); it was (we can suppose) no coincidence that it was in Los Angeles that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, both German students of longwinded and abstract 19th century philosophers such as Hegel and Schopenhauer, wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that tersely describes the culture industry's domination of human life in the present era. One can furthermore see the connection between the values generated by the culture industry (as it influences every aspect of modern society) and the layout of southern California. Southern California is allowed to function as an industrial entity through elaborate canals stretching from northern California 400 miles away and across the vast Mojave Desert from the Colorado River; the oil that paves and motorizes southern California's extensive network of freeways comes largely from elsewhere as well. Southern California is an extensive metropolis practically unmixed with agriculture and characterized by some of America's highest property values, suburb after suburb connected by freeways, entertained by shopping malls and by Hollywood (America's mass-media center), fed by supermarkets, housed in endless stretches of small homes and apartments. The values expressed by southern California residents, consequently, are heteronomously dependent upon the products of big businesses (and the money it takes to buy such products), and evince passively consumerist values in a way that is especially exemplary, and are reflective of a prosperity that is apportioned unequally, as Mike Davis reflected of southern California in his area history City of Quartz.

Within Horkheimer and Adorno's above quote is a reverence to the fact that "technology has changed human beings from children into persons." Of course, American society does not see technology as the mechanism bringing children into adulthood, Ralph Nader's comments about the children of today being raised by the television set notwithstanding. The process transforming people from children into persons within the southern California environment can today be observed, not through the industrial process which has historically replaced medieval society with the "bourgeois public sphere," but rather through the public school system, which inducts the masses (when they are young) into the schooling process, in hopes of transforming such masses according to some stated or unstated model of personhood. In short, schooling is America's ostensible mechanism for producing adults.

But schooling is, of all the institutions of southern California consumer life, the most problematically integrated into late capitalism's schemes of consumption and production. (We can see this if we apply the production paradigm to an analysis of school activities: for instance, homework and schoolwork are unclear as to whether they represent products with use-value, or just a mere wastage of the child labor force.) There is a product to be expected from the school system; folk wisdom about schools is often repeated in terms of bad schools and good schools, and within the schools, bad students and good students. The product, one must presume, is good schools and good students. Philosophers may decree that schooling experiences are much too complex to be deemed a "product" -- nevertheless, schools are paid for with tax moneys and consumed by students who are epxected to produce, and thus the discourse of production/ consumption pervades school systems, regardless of whether any such additional activity as the transformation of children into "persons" (i.e. civically-participant adults), such as cannot be conceptually reduced to a production process, is going on. Perhaps in real life the actual task of transforming people within the consumerist environment of American late capitalism is accomplished through repeated inculcation to the discourses and images of television and other mass media; nevertheless, educational systems and families are the primary systems whereby people are ostensibly transformed from children into persons. In this regard aggregate qualitative data about educational systems is more accessible to researchers than aggregate qualitative data about families. Furthermore, schools are demarcated by typical social rules, within American society, as places where researchers (i.e. teacher-researchers) can engage processes of social transformation. Thus my interest in schools. But one needs a narrative of "how things got this way" within schools, so as to bridge two narratives of school within society: school as a transformative place of human development, with school as a product of an industrial system. To understand the integration of school into society (as conceived thusly), one must understand the politics of education, encompassing the dominant narratives through which public school systems are promoted and maintained.

Education, it might be assumed, is currently a "hot political topic" now, amidst the media-trumpeted American prosperity of the second Clinton Administration. And the discourses almost always taken by political pundits in light of this political "hotness" appear to manifest what Woodiwiss (1993), following Jacoby (1977), called "social amnesia," or rather a general social forgetting of its conditions of existence, through the use of functionally-specific forgetting narratives. One can see this forgetting in Ira Shor's recent history of American schooling titled Culture Wars, specifically a history of the various reforms of the "restoration era" (1969-present) in education, where each reform is described as having as its pretext "less respect for teacher authority among students" (Shor p. 147), with its proponents seemingly forgetting (among other things) that the last reform used that perception as its pretext as well.

Since, as I said above, the reigning discourses of late capitalist political life concern themselves with who deserves to produce and who deserves to consume, and come in two forms, elitist and egalitarian, the reigning discourses about education come in these forms as well. I will explain my dichotomy as follows.

Egalitarian educational politics discourses draw upon traditions of the equal rights of all to an adequate education, or rather to educational parity (as promised by the 1964 Civil Rights Act etc.), to the right of all to an education tailored to individual needs (as promissed by Public Law 94-142, the Federal mandate requiring districts to provide special education for students with special needs or handicaps), and to civic education, to education as the idea of preparing students for participation in democratic life.

Elitist discourses of educational politics do not come out and announce themselves as being elitist -- that is to say, the elitist ideologues of education to not come out and say that they are in favor of an ideal model of better education for some, and worse education for others, to be implemented at once. Rather, advertising for elitist aims decks itself out in egalitarian discursive clothing. Gee, Hull, and Lankshear, in their (1996) book The New Work Order, explain how the newest discourses of educational reform, congruent with what I will call "semi-critical classroom management" in Chapter 7, dovetail with an older, familiar world of cutthroat capitalism. The newest discourse of education, explain the authors, heralds a form of "cooperative education" that appears egalitarian on the surface, incorporates egalitarian work organization into its structures, but nevertheless brings its students into a world of global capitalist winners and losers in a way that promotes moral obliquity amidst a world where

the new capitalism's complex global systems further operate to drive large numbers of people into misery comparable to the worst excesses of the beginnings of industrial capitalism -- even amid the high-tech successes of an enchanted few (Gee et al., 147)."

Meanwhile the same educational policy makers, with an agreeing public voting behind them, are allowed to forget the distortion of academic objectives perpetrated upon schools by the mania for testing and accounability, to deprive their students of learning experiences that aren't "accountable" for the sake of other such experiences which are, and to forget that the mere imposition of "standards" will stigmatize but not improve the lives of those who fail to meet such "standards." GOALS 2000 has, furthermore (according to Arons (1997)), replaced the possibility of serious debate about American educational goals with a push toward nationwide standardization and a political battle to determine what exactly what names that standardization will acquire.

Against dominant elitist discourses of education, discourses that have incidentally pervaded hierarchical systems of education as they exist in America and throughout the world, Gee et al. advocate a counter-discourse which would disavow the consumer determinism of the new capitalism. It would argue for the reinvigoration of the local as against the faux local of the new capitalism. It would see critique as necessary to real learning and thus as part and parcel of critical thinking and the empowerment of workers. Most importantly, it would envision a new 'global citizenship' in terms of which we all begin to care about the members of the cooperative in (the poorer countries) and about the poor in our own communities -- as being linked to each other and ourselves -- if only to avoid degradation of all our spaces and lives. (Gee et al., p. 166)

This goal is much too general to spell out any particular remedy for the malaise of education as described within a critical narrative, a narrative that asks what the dysfunctional effects of the whole system (as it has run so far) are. On the other hand, it's nice to say that one should promote global caring within education, but the revolution in process that would allow teachers, the intended audience of Gee et al.'s book, to do so when the a priori of the educational process itself is the industrial process that pervades all of culture under late capitalism -- that's a different prescription.

In describing the educational systems I see, I would start with the relationship between teachers and students -- if teachers are to make education anything more than an inefficient culture industry producing a "student body," they must begin by regarding "student action" as the "results" of teaching, rather than by narrowly regarding the whole system as producing nothing but test scores and well-entertained (or hard-working) "normal" students and less-well-entertained and less-hard-working "at risk" students, within a human warehouse legally defined as a school. School life must, in other words, be accepted as legitimate by students, to count as an arena of "learning." To make this happen, schools must actually be legitimate -- if there isn't the wherewithal in the school setting to legitimize learning as a goal of the community of students acting for itself, the school system can be described thusly as a mere disciplinary system, of the type Foucault lumped with prisons, factories, hospitals, barrackses etc. in Discipline and Punish. Given the structural concerns about culture, production, and capitalist industry I have raised, it is not surprising that this reversion pervades the school systems I analyze. Thus, later in this dissertation, I will discuss disciplinary behaviors as representing the majority of my observances in the various subject districts of my study.

Further hindering the above goal is this matter: if the "legitimized school" outcome is to be the result of an adult-planned program of school reform (of schools that presently don't "count" to the students), these same meanings of schooling that are legitimate to the students, and other participants in the schooling process as well, must appear legitimate to adult authority-figures. This, of course, is the idea of "manifest politics" as it would appear within the discourse of critical pedagogy. The various school systems are disciplinary systems, today, and changing them in ways that affect their disciplinary character is important, to be sure (and we will discuss one such change in a discussion of the "Unz Initiative," California's Proposition 227, an initiative that will become important to my subject districts), but these changes are not politically important to the advocate of critical pedagogy.

To understand student action, student willingness to learn, one must therefore go to the schools, and see students in action in order to get an appreciation of "what students do" in an ongoing social construction of the lives of the participants in school. In order to make this social construction narratively manifest, I must offer an ethnographic narrative of a school or (in my case) a school system, a narrative of what students do, how this doing becomes important in the various contexts that fill the lives of participants in a school day.

The following ethnographic study (comprising the bulk of this dissertation), therefore, starts from the premise that it is the study of the discourse about educators, namely, about substitute teachers, but it is the study of such discourse from the presupposition that "what students do" is important to the justification of school as school. To accomplish this study, I spent 1 1/2 years as a substitute teacher in the public schools of southern California, building upon previous experience in that line of work.

Besides being a subsitute teacher-ethnographer employed by a number of school systems and thus thrust, I participated in the commodity-life of southern California. Schooling, like most other aspects of "lifestyle" for Californians, is also a commodity which generally in the United States is paid for through the permission of the State (and not entirely through unsubsidized private enterprise). But schooling-as-commodity, privately or publically funded, bears little relationship to any consensus notion of how schooling is experienced in the eyes of its participants, since schooling appears differently if we think of students, teachers, other employees as mere producers and consumers of a commodified learning to take place within a paid-for time-space, than if we add the narrative of schooling that regards learning as something about how human beings experience the world.

When school becomes irrelevant to students' participation in experience, when the lesson goes on because the experience is a paid-for commodity and not because anyone is paying attention, when in the commodified context of schooling the majority of students have rejected the school's content and formed anti-school cultures (often students in these schools have a non-standing with adults as school-consumers). "Authentic learning" in this era becomes the television set and its generation of genres of "chismes" or of "gossip," the main language-arts product of many of the children I observed as a substitute teacher. The form of "authentic learning" practiced by these children combines with a privatizing common teacher notion of "classroom discipline," to create a set of public spaces essentially rendered as "anti-public public spaces," public spaces which follow the division of space between "streetcorner state" (publicity) and "student state" (privacy) as described in Peter McLaren's Schoolilng as a Ritual Performance. In McLaren's narrative of educational motives miscarried, the educator-as-shaman that McLaren sees as a powerful ritual moment in the Catholic school he studied becomes downgraded to the model of the educator-as-cop, with the effect that education becomes the mere ritual of "making Catholics" for McLaren, and meaninglessly fitting them into lower-class jobs as a result. I won't make the broader claim McLaren makes, also made by Paul Willis in Learning to Labour (among many other researchers), that schooling reproduces the class structure of everyday business society, but I do feel my experience within the schools validates the disciplinary models they use, to study the disciplinary schools they (and I) observe.

In the next chapter I shall describe how I acquired the position to do this ethnographic study, both theoretically and practically. I will first outline my descriptive theory for the rituals of schooling and their connection to a politicized reality, which is derivative of the theory of disciplinary schooling as portrayed in Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and the theories of ritual of Victor Turner and most especially of Peter McLaren's school ethnography Schooling as a Ritual Performance. I will then give an experiential account of how I positioned myself as an observer of the schools through substitute teaching, with an emphasis upon showing the importance of the ethnographer's subject-position in school ethnography.

Then in the third chapter I shall proceed to an account of my own story as an ethnographer, summarizing what phenomena I tended to see in the context of substitute teaching, with an emphasis on the meanings to be made from these experiences.

The next three chapters are literary reviews. The fourth chapter will consider and analyze the texts about substitute teaching, both professionally-printed texts and more-or-less "field" texts like lesson plans left for substitutes. The fifth chapter will concern itself with the narrative analysis of texts in classroom management, defined here as a genre of discourse centrally concerned with maintaining instructional ritual according to a script executed prominently by a teacher. The sixth chapter will analyze "semi-critical classroom management" as a refinement upon the discourse of classroom management.

The last chapter will sort out political meaning, as it has been hinted at in previous chapters. I will summarize here the important distinction between latent politics, politics as signified and anticipated in the everyday life of school, and manifest politics, political action as it counts to a world of public participation and government edict.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Samuel Day Fassbinder
Do not reproduce without author's permission

Chapter 2 -- Curriculum vitae