Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform,

Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform,
Book by David A. Gabbard; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000

Preface This book advances a threefold political agenda:

1.	It demonstrates how the meanings assigned to a whole vocabulary of words and phrases frequently used to discuss the role and reform of U.S. public schools reflect an essentially economic view of the world.
2.	It contends that education or educational reform conducted under an economized worldview will only intensify the nefarious effects of the colonial relations of political, cultural, and economic domination that it breeds at home and abroad.
3.	It offers a set of alternative concepts and meanings for reformulating the role of U.S. public schools and for considering the implications of such a reformulation more generally for the underlying premises of all human relationships and activities.

Toward these ends, the various entries comprising Part I of this volume critically examine many of the most commonly used terms within the rhetoric of educational reform since the early 1980s and before. Each of these entries expands our awareness of the economized worldview that pervades the contemporary educational reform movement and sensitizes us to the manner in which that worldview reduces the value of everything to a measure of economic utility. Accordingly, education is only valuable to the extent that it services an economic imperative.

The entries in Part II link the economized worldview to curricular and instructional issues. These entries are especially important for comprehending how the organization of school curriculum privileges those disciplines deemed most central to market expansion (e.g., math and science) and how the political centrality of the economic sphere influences the nature of theknowledge presented in specific content areas. In addition to critiquing the economic form of perception reproduced by these key concepts, the authors of the entries in Parts I and II also offer proposals for how the meaning of these words might be de-economized to reflect a different, more vernacular perception of reality, one that does not separate the economic from the cultural, political, spiritual, moral, and natural spheres of human experience. Given that language constrains as well as advances human thought, the twin tasks of de-economizing education and decolonizing society will require a vocabulary that transcends the familiar terminologies addressed in Parts I and II. Part III, then, provides space to cultivate the beginnings of such a vocabulary as the authors elucidate innovative concepts they view as central to the creation of truly alternative educational visions and practices. To paraphrase Wolfgang Sachs's ( 1992) description of his fine collection that inspired me to pursue this project, "this book is an invitation to review the economized model of reality and to recognize that we all wear not merely tinted, but tainted, glasses if we take part in the prevailing educational discourse" ( Sachs, 1992, p. 5).

In addition to Maureen, Mark, Nate, and the other good people at The Percolator coffee shop who kept the java flowing while I edited this volume at my "office away from the office," I need to give special thanks to my wife, Astrid, for supporting me through many months of long evenings spent locked up in my "office at home." I gratefully acknowledge the institutional support of the Department of Foundations, Research and Reading in the School of Education at East Carolina University. I would also like to thank the many contributors to this volume, not only for their outstanding work but more important, for their patience and understanding while this project went through many too many unfortunate delays. Between the two of us, Astrid and I lost three parents and an older sibling while I carried out the editorial work on this collection. Losing them made an already daunting task that much more difficult. Finally, then, I want to thank Naomi Silverman and Joel Spring for their support. Their patience and compassion during this difficult time was most appreciated.

REFERENCE

Sachs W. ( 1992) The development dictionary: A guide to knowledge as power. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.

Introduction

David A. Gabbard East Carolina University

SPREADING THE SECULAR GOSPEL

To challenge the belief that a people's economic development proceeds in direct proportion to their level of educational achievement poses a threat of heresy against one of the most fundamental principles in modern secular theology. Precisely because education and development each implies a process resulting in some form of favorable change, we may properly speak of them as separate values. However, whereas education has a history of conceptual evolution separate from that of development, their evolutionary paths have since merged and congealed into one of the great and sacred certainties of our era. Nowhere, perhaps, has this belief taken stronger hold than in the United States, where the educational reform initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s have now elevated this belief to canonical status.

At least two approaches present themselves for casting doubt on this sacred truism. The first entails an inquiry into the truthfulness of the claim. Since the National Commission on Excellence in Education released "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, corporate elites and elected officials have orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the public that schools are, at once, the cause and the cure for their economic insecurity. In typical fashion, the media very obediently assisted in facilitating this fraud, helping to further entrench the belief that a people's economic development proceeds in direct proportion to their level of educational achievement. Not only has the media helped to spread this secular theology, it has also protected it from any serious public scrutiny by failing to report any of the most elementary facts that would call its presuppositions to question. For example, current educational reform initiatives advanced under corporate sponsorship attribute the deterioration of U.S. competitiveness in world markets to the declining quality of U.S. education. They further attribute this decline to the "liberal" reforms of the 1960s and 1970s...

1 ^* Global Economy

Noam Chomsky Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The South Commission ( 1990) study, The Challenge to the South, closes with a call for a "new world order" that will respond to "the South's plea for justice, equity, and democracy in the global society" ( 1990, p. 287). The rulers of that society, however, adhere to quite a different conception of world order, expressed by Winston Churchill ( 1951): "The government of the world must be entrusted to the satisfied nations," the "rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations" whose power places them "above the rest," not the "hungry nations" who "seek more" and hence endanger tranquility (p. 382). The global rulers can hardly be expected to heed the pleas of the South, any more than rights were granted to the general population, as a gift from above, within the rich societies themselves. Those assigned the status of spectators from below can afford no illusions on these matters.

The realities are illustrated in the South Commission's study. For instance, it observes that gestures to Third World concerns in the 1970s were "undoubtedly spurred" by worry about "the newly found assertiveness of the South after the rise in oil prices in 1973" (p. 216). As the threat abated, the rich lost interest and turned to "a new form of neo-colonialism," monopolizing control over the world economy, undermining the more democratic elements of the United Nations, and in general proceeding to institutionalize "the South's second-class status." The pattern is consistent; it would be remarkable if it were otherwise.It is Churchill's vision that has always inspired the rich rulers, who, needless to

____________________

^*	This chapter is essentially a reprint of "World orders: Old and new", by N. Chomsky. In Facing the challenge: Responses to the report of the south commission. (pp. 139-151). Copyright © by ZED books. Reprinted with permission.
2 Crisis Karen A. Barnhardt University of Montana The United States can aptly be characterized as a "culture of crisis." It is a society that seems to nourish itself on the production, reproduction, and consumption of crises. Attending to the vast array of public discourses on any given day, one cannot help but be struck by the sense of apocalyptic doom they profess. From the breakdown of family values to the decline of economic stability, from the failure of the public schools to the collapse of public and personal ethics and morality, and from the uncontrollable spread of violence to the outbreak of increasingly alarming rates of drug use, the discourses of our day seek to remind us that we live in a sea of never-ending threat and turmoil. This chapter seeks to present a genealogical sketching of these "discourses of crisis" or what Linda Singer calls 'crisis talk" ( 1993). Throughout the last 350 years, European immigrants to North America have produced a vast genre of public crisis discourses called "jeremiads." A "jeremiad" derives its name from the Book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible and from the Old Testament. It represents an ancient prophetic and ritualistic tradition of public lamentation that seeks to call a people back to faith, often in a time of great tribulation. In the mappings that follow, I will make visible the way in which the use of a jeremiad oper- -17-

Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Publication Title: Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform. Contributors: David A. Gabbard - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Place of Publication: Mahwah, NJ. Page Number: 17. Publication Year: 2000.

3 Choice

Joel Spring State University of New York at New Paltz

The word "choice" in education conjures up visions of democracy and freedom-loving parents happily selecting from many educational alternatives. How was this vision distorted into an antidemocratic plan to allow parents to choose among schools teaching the same centrally determined curriculum? How did choice plans calling for less bureaucratic control result in greater bureaucratic control of the ideologies taught in public schools?

To answer these questions, I begin with a discussion of Austrian econom. ics and the reaction of Protestant fundamentalists to the secularization of public schools. In the 1970s, Austrian economists supported the demands of Protestant fundamentalists for the right of parents to choose between public and private schools. Christian fundamentalist organizations -- the Moral Majority in the 1980s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s -- exerted political pressure on the Republican party to support choice in education. From the 1970s to the 1990s, conservative think tanks and foundations popularized Austrian economics which, in turn, influenced the Republican party, the movement to reinvent government and the schools, and President Bill Clinton's New Democrat doctrines. In addition, the sharp reaction of the teachers' unions influenced choice plans in the Democratic party.

Austrian economics is the best place to begin understanding the changing meaning of choice in education. Although originating in the 19th century, Austrian economics gained its foothold in the United States at the

4 Reform

Thomas S. Popkewitz University of Wisconsin-Madison

This chapter is about the study of educational reform. It is not to ask how can we engage in reform efforts but rather how can we think about reform as a governing practice. This governing is not one of governmental policy to set directions and principles for educational practices. Rather, the governing is concerned with linking political rationalities to subjectivities, that is, the governing principles through which people think, talk, speak, and act as self-responsible individuals. This governing is what Foucault ( 1979) calls governmentality.

Reform in the United States embodies efforts to administer change through the production of a self-governing individuality. We can excavate this idea of reform through recognizing that the word "reform" does not have constant meanings but embodies different concepts over time. In the beginning of the 19th century, reform was concerned with helping sinners find salvation. But by the mid-20th century, reform assumed its modern shape as state administrative projects to reorganize institutions and to change individuals in the name of liberty and freedom.

Reform as the administration of change embodies two overlaying discourses. One is "scientific" rational planning of social and individual life. The second is a millennial religious discourse about progress. This idea of progress is that the better world is to be produced through the administration of the soul. Policy and science are to change society through administering the inner capabilities of the individual who acts as a self-responsible and

5 Leadership

Wanda Pillow University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Who do you think of when you think of a leader: CEO, president, military figure, coach, parent, church official? Are there characteristics or qualities you think a leader must possess or not possess? More specifically, is this leader who comes to your mind mate or female; what are her or his physical characteristics; how do you expect this leader to act? Perhaps more important who do you not think of when you think of a leader?

Our assumptions, images, and cultural understanding of who a leader is, who a leader should be, are embedded in the responses we give to these questions. Where do our images of leadership come from and why? This chapter traces some of the historical, cultural, and political tensions that have shaped how we think about educational leadership. It situates leadership within a political context -- one influenced by cultural, political, moral, and economic needs. How has the development of schools as bureaucratic organizations affected educational leadership? How does the current reform movement characterize leadership? After considering these questions, I turn to the challenges and possibilities for transformational leadership offered by feminist interpretations of power, authority, and leadership.

From the time that school administration emerged as a profession in the mid-19th century, efforts to define the administrator's role have always been contentious. Is the school principal an administrator or a leader? The debate has centered around two competing purposes of education -- management and training versus visionary citizenship -- with recent reform

6 Accountability

David A. Gabbard

East Carolina University

The notion of "accountability" resonates with the sound of authority and, therefore, the sound of power. It implies a state of being in which persons are obliged to answer to others. Accountability, then, also implies hierarchical institutional structures and a certain economy of power requisite to the maintenance and vitality of those structures. Individuals do not become accountable on their own. Accountability signifies a status that is only achieved through the delegation of authority. It assumes the existence of some person or group of persons who possess the authority to declare that something shall be done, but whose power to carry out that task is limited by their inability to be everywhere and do everything at the same time. Consequently, they must delegate their authority to others. Those who receive this authority, however, do not receive it in full. Delegation always implies a diminishment of authority. The aims of power have been previously determined. Those to whom authority has been delegated have no authority to determine what those aims should be. Power flows through them, not from them. Whoever is held accountable is an agent of power, a mere delegate of the authority who decides power's intended aims. At most, the authority of accountable persons is limited to establishing the means by which the ends of power shall be achieved. At the very least, their authority is limited to ensuring that previously established means are followed in pursuit of the desired ends. In either case, these delegates are accountable to some higher authority; they must answer to that authority. And they must answer for something.

7 Discipline

Felecia M. Briscoe Concord College

It serves us well to remember that the public school has always been viewed as a mechanism for reforming the behavior of children and adolescents. It was the "sinful" behavior of colonial youth that prompted the first Massachusetts school law in 1642, and problems of "juvenile delinquency" triggered the urban school movement in the early 18th century. Discipline, then, is hardly a new concern in education. In tracing the genealogy of modern technologies of discipline, Michel Foucault ( 1977) describes a shift in the aims and strategies of power. Under the feudal system, the primary aim of sovereignty was chiefly concerned with protecting its power from domestic as well as foreign enemies. To protect his position, the sovereign could rely on force (punishment) or the threat of punishment to repress any behaviors that might endanger his authority. With the rise of the modern nation state, however, the aims of power shifted. It no longer sufficed to merely protect the sovereign authority of the state. The state now required the means to constantly expand and improve on its productive capacities in order to maximize its wealth and, thereby, its strength. As Foucault ( 1981) explains these new strategies of power exercised themselves

through social production and social service. It becomes a matter of obtaining productive service from individuals in their concrete lives. And in consequence, a real and effective 'incorporation' of power was necessary, in the sense that power had to be able to gain access to the bodies of individuals, to their acts, attitudes, and modes of everyday behavior. Hence the significance of methods like school discipline, which succeeded in making children's bodies the object of highly complex systems of manipulation and conditioning. (p. 125)

8 Classroom Management

William E. Doll, Jr. Louisiana State University

Classroom management, indeed management in general, is usually not associated with disturbance. Disturbance is to be avoided, not advocated. Management has to do with control -- centralized control -- and disturbance dissipates that control; hence to be avoided. "Do not lose control of the classroom" is the number one fiat given beginning classroom teachers. The loss of control is the novice teacher's greatest fear. But what does this loss of control mean? What does control mean?

The dictionary I have at hand ( American Heritage, 1969, pp. 290-291) says for control: (1) to exercise authority dominating influence over; direct; regulate. (2) to hold in restraint; to check. John Dewey devoted a whole chapter to control in his Democracy and Education ( 1916/ 1966). Presaging my dictionary definition, he says, "Control subordinates a person's natural impulses to another's end," and the term as thus used has "a flavor of coercion or compulsion about it" (p. 24). Indeed, if control -- what I have elsewhere called "the ghost in the curriculum" ( Doll, 1998, p. 295) -- is exercising a dominating influencee over, is holding in restraint, is subordinating a person's natural impulses, and has a flavor of coercion about it, then how can learning that is good, deep, meaningful take place in such an atmosphere? Wrestling with this question may well provide us with reason to rethink the whole notion of classroom management as centralized control. It may not be oxymoronic to think of a term like "dissipated control." Maybe a case can be made for a sense of control that is noncentralized; a sense of control based on "just the right amount of disturbance."

9 Learning

Eleanor Blair Hilty Western Carolina University

Learning. Isn't the concept of "learning" really the foundation of all discussions of school reform? It would seem that the aims and purposes of education and schooling are essentially linked to conceptualizations of learning. More important, discussions of these aims and purposes are integral to most critiques of public education and even to the reform recommendations that so often evolve from these critiques. Issues related to school improvement and school reform really focus on learning: what children should be learning, why children don't learn, and even how to be better parents and teachers so that we can accelerate learning and our children (and students) can achieve higher and higher test scores and be.... well, "successful."

Success in the 1990s has become synonymous with high test scores. The values and beliefs associated with using test scores as a measure of excellent academic programs and high achievement are unquestioned by a large percentage of the population. Perhaps more disturbing is the general acceptance and support of accountability measures among politicians and individuals in powerful positions who negotiate a vision of school reform that by necessity includes rewards and commendations for school systems that produce high test scores. For example, site-based management, one of the more popular school reform initiatives across the nation, merges issues

10 Literacy

Colin Lankshear Central Queensland University

Educational reform discourse emphasizes four broad types of literacy. These may be construed as the "lingering basics," the "new basics," the "elite literacies, " and "foreign language literacy." There is an overarching emphasis on standard English literacy, presupposed in the first three types.

At the school level, "lingering basics" refers to mastery of generalizable techniques and concepts for decoding and encoding print, presumed to be building blocks for subsequent education: content and "higher order skills." At the adult level, it refers to functional capacities with everyday texts enabling citizens to meet basic print needs for being incorporated into the economic and civic "mainstream." These conceptions "linger" from an earlier period.

The "new basics" reflects recognition that major shifts have occurred in social practices with the transitions from an agro-industrial economy to a postindustrial information-services economy; "Fordism" to "post-Fordism;" personal face-to-face communities to impersonal metropolitan and "virtual" communities; a paternal (welfare) state to a more devolved state requiring greater self-sufficiency. These shifts are seen to demand on the part of all individuals qualitatively more sophisticated ("smart"), abstract, symbolic-logical capacities than were needed in the past. Hence, "the percentage of all students who demonstrate ability to reason, solve problems, apply knowledge, and write and communicate effectively will increase substantially" (Goals 2000, Goal 3 B [ii] ).

11 Ideology

Michael A. Weinstein Purdue University

"Ideology" and "Education" are radically polysemic signifiers. The definition of ideology varies according to each ideology, and there is no non-ideological ("scientific" or "objective") definition that provides a standard for judging all other ideologies definitively. Then what does this chapter mean by ideology? This discourse is about educational ideologies and the ideology of education ("education" as the supreme signifier) from the viewpoint of a radically individualizing pedagogy. It is ideological according to the definition of ideology that is interior to it.

Education is a practical philosophy; it considers all human practices from the viewpoint of how they are to be taught, which means that education must understand those practices in order to transmit them. The entire structure of knowledge is present in a different way -- as a structure of transmission -- in education than it is in philosophy, which entertains knowledge through the reflective judgement. There are at least as many definitions of education as there are philosophical positions. This chapter has already defined education in terms of practices and their transmission, which invokes an agent-patient relation rather than, for example, mutuality and is biased in favor of behavior over personal experience. For the critical side of individualizing pedagogy, education in contemporary capitalist societies is predominantly a system of transmitting practices and co-constituting subjects who are fit to perform those practices. The co-constitution of those fit subjects is the ideological phase or component of education in the capitalist apparatus.

12 Empowerment

H. Svi Shapiro University of North Carolina-Greensboro

Several languages of power frame schooling and education in the United States; the most salient of these is what is sometimes referred to as "possessive individualism." It is a concept of power or empowerment that reflects a marriage of liberal individualism and the constitutive social context of the capitalist market. In this, power is a personal attribute -- a set of skills, capabilities, and knowledge that promise an individual the possibility of success. fully negotiating the hazards of a competitive and predatory culture. To be without such skills and capabilities is to make oneself vulnerable to economic disenfranchisement and to social stigmatization. School is the principal agency for the allocation of this knowledge. More than this, school is the social institution that most strongly articulates this language of personal empowerment and the possibility of acquiring those traits that can, at the very least, ensure the capacity for survival in an uncertain and dangerous world.

I have written earlier that this notion of education, understood as the medium for the acquisition of certain minimum competencies that might ensure an individual a degree of agency in the pursuit of one's livelihood, forms a potent focus for the public discourse around education ( Shapiro, 1993). Its resonance is associated with the way in which school is viewed by much of the population as crucial to the possibilities for individual self-sufficiency and self-reliance. To be "minimally competent" comes to imply some capacity to make one's way in the world. It suggests that the ap-

13 Inclusive Education

Linda Ware University of Rochester

In this chapter I present a genealogy on special education informed by the experiences of 12 high school students with whom I conducted research on inclusion. The students participated in a series of four critical dialogues -- a research method designed to engage research participants and researchers in open-ended dialogue specific to an identified research problem ( Ware, 1994a, 1995a, 1997; Ware & Gee, 1995). With an emphasis on meaning making at the local level, critical dialogues take shape over time (repeated sessions) and build on the belief that from birth on, humans construct webs of belief, desires, and attitudes that ground their view of self and reality and that these webs allow us to interpret and thus to act in the contexts in which we find ourselves ( Rorty, 1982, 1991). Critical dialogues were also conducted with teachers who supported the inclusion program; however, moving the microphone from the teachers to the students framed inclusion in a more politicized context informed by struggle, resistance, and conflict.

The students recounted prior experiences in traditional pullout special education programs as well as in their present experiences with inclusion, describing their lives in the space between the binary divisions of exclusion and inclusion. Their histories spanned 5-to-10 years of special education placement in which their local accounts of the examinations, the judgments, and the uninterrupted observations paralleled the "techniques of surveillance" described by Foucault ( 1978). In their tales of what has been

14 Gifted Education

Mara Sapon-Shevin Syracuse University

Gifted education consists of programs, courses, and opportunities that are provided for a small group of students who are identified as "gifted" or "talented." Admission to a gifted program is generally obtained by scoring well on a standardized IQ test, which must often then be supported by teacher recommendations. Students identified as "gifted" sometimes attend pullout enrichment programs for part of the day or week, or they may be served in segregated all-gifted classrooms or attend completely separate schools, to which they must apply and are admitted competitively.

Why do some students get certain educational benefits whereas others are denied them? I examine here the reasons that gifted education systems are promoted and maintained, the implications of those constructions, and then the ways in which the discourse about gifted education impedes a more critical stance.

The need and importance of providing discrete, specialized services for students identified as "gifted" is generally justified in three ways: educational need, social justice, and political and economic necessity. Those who argue from an educational perspective assert that providing different educational opportunities for students with accelerated skills is simply a way of meeting the individual (and different) needs of different students. In other words, it's just "good teaching" to treat different kids differently. The social justice perspective argues that it's only fair to treat different kids differently, and since schools already provide differentiated programming for students

15 Desegregation

Marvin J. Berlowitz Ivan Watts University of Cincinnati

Although neoliberalism has its origins outside the United States, its basic premises support the traditional doctrines of laissez faire capitalism (also see Joel Spring on the notion of "choice," this vol.). In essence, neoliberal policies seek to advance the'natural rights' of private corporations to freely pursue their rational interests -- to maximize profit and market share. To protect and defend that freedom, corporations must negate whatever rights that the general public might claim to protection from the consequences of their pursuits. The public's exercise of those rights, as manifested in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the women's movement, resulted in the same governmental regulations and social programs now under heavy attack in the era of neoliberalism. Programs ranging from Reaganomics to the Contract with America, buttressed by President Clinton's peculiar brand of accommodation, are dismantling the gains of the civil rights movement and even the New Deal. This chapter focuses on the undermining of the landmark Brown decision of 1954 by means of racist offensives in educational reform that use magnet schools as mechanisms for restoring a camouflaged dual school system. This dual school system functions to reproduce the division of labor in this "neoliberal" stage of capitalist development.

In more advanced nations such as the United States, neoliberal policies manifest themselves in an increasing polarization of living standards and

16 Race

Joyce E. King Medgar Evers College

By conservative estimate, upward of fourteen million Africans were imported into the Atlantic slave trade. For every African that reached these shores alive, four died in the machinery of slavery at one end or the other of the traffic or in the dreadful Middle Passage. That's at least sixty million people lost from West Africa in less than four hundred years -- genocide on a scale unmatched in recorded history. ( Walker, 1979, pp. 43-44)

... Everybody talking 'bout heaven ain't goin' there.

-- African American Spiritual

Although anthropologists have called race "man's most dangerous myth" ( Montagu, 1974), this societal discourse continues to function as the metanarrative of our times. Acknowledging that race is a "tricky social construction," Scheurich and Young ( 1997) observe that "to use it is to reinforce it as 'real', to naturalize it . . . ; to not use it is to act as if race were no longer a significant differentiating variable in social life . . . or in education and research" (p. 12, note 1). This chapter discusses this dominant metanarrative from an altercentric perspective, that is, from the liminal perspective; of "alterity" that results from the alter-ego status of conceptual blackness in relation to conceptual whiteness ( S. Wynter, personal communication, March 18, 1994). Such a perspective locates the origins of the ideological belief system of race and current usages of this construct in the

17 Class

Steve Tozer University of Illinois, Chicago

A major premise underlying this volume is that the agenda of educational reform in this country has been driven not primarily by a commitment to the development of human capacities but instead by the language and concerns of economics. The case of "class" presents something of a paradox. Here we have a social construct that is centrally economic in its origins, but one that has been nearly omitted from the educational conversation altogether. At best, class is admitted to the discussion only in a modified form -- usually as a notion of "socioeconomic status" or SES. Socioeconomic status shifts the educational analysis away from the role of society's economic structure toward family backgrounds and practices, such as parent's education and numbers of books in the household. For the educator who understands its multiple meanings, however, the notion of class not only explains a great deal about why so many students and teachers struggle to achieve learning in the classroom; it also challenges the particular economic world-view underlying the contemporary school reform movement.

It is not surprising that economic class structure in the United States is not a part of the language of contemporary school reform. Serious discussion of class -- or even its mention is uncommon in the United States generally, where the popular myth is sustained that "we don't live in a nation of classes" ( Fussell, 1992, p. 15). Americans readily recognize, of course, the existence of extremes of wealth and poverty, as they are portrayed in enduringly popular literature, film, and musicals such as Les Miserables, The

18 Gender

Kathleen Bennett deMarrais University of Georgia

What do we mean by gender? How do we construct gendered identities? What role do family and friends play in this construction? How do our cultural institutions and practices, particularly schools, shape our gendered identities? What roles do schools play in this process? This chapter addresses these questions through the story of Lauren (a pseudonym) and her experiences of identity construction. Following Lauren's story, I explore gender in relation to the realities of educational reform in today's schools. I conclude with suggestions for ways we might transform current notions of gender in school sites to work toward collectively constructing lives that are more truly free of current capitalist dictates.

First, a clarification of terms. The words sex and gender do not carry the same meaning; they are not interchangeable. Sex, a visible and usually permanent identifying attribute acquired at birth, refers to the physical characteristics associated with being male or female. Gender is a more inclusive term that refers not only to physiological characteristics but to learned cultural behaviors and understandings. Joan Wallach Scott ( 1988) reminds us that the word "gender"

becomes a way of denoting 'cultural constructions' -- the entirely social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men. It is a way of referring to the exclusively social origins of the subjective identities of men and

II TERMS OF POWER/KNOWLEDGE

19 Curriculum

Brent Davis Dennis J. Sumara York University

John Ralston Saul ( 1995) describes ours as "a civilization ... in the embrace of a dominant ideology: corporatism" (p. 2). And, as with any successful ideology, the corporatist mind-set spreads a transparent web of metaphors and assertions that support particular manners of perceiving "reality" and of acting toward it.

Having settled into the invisibility of common sense, it is not surprising that corporatist notions infuse conventional curriculum projects. Most obviously, the manner of thinking and acting that corporatism sponsors is revealed in the uncritical rhetoric and activity that characterize the modern schooling project, made evident in desires to specify outcomes, establish standards, increase efficiency, ensure accountability, maintain competitiveness, and so on.

The profound intertwinings of corporatism and curriculum are perhaps most clearly articulated in the work of Ralph Tyler ( 1949), wherein curriculum making is reduced to set of prescribed directives and decisions. In essence, as articulated by Tyler (and as pervasively taken up by today's curriculum authorities), the process of assembling a curriculum is not unlike any project of construction. It begins with the determination of the end product -- in this case, the desired learning outcomes that, following Tyler, are commonsensically defined to be the sorts of things that one needs to

19 Curriculum

Brent Davis Dennis J. Sumara York University

21 Language Arts Education

Alan A. Block University of Wisconsin, Stout

But there is no "p" in literacy, you may note. And perhaps that is the problem with issues of literacy as they are discussed in public circles in the United States today. I argue that unless we situate the "p in literacy -- acknowledge its basis in politics -- all our discussions and efforts produce what might be conceptualized as an educational black hole. Now, as I understand the concept of a black hole, it is an object in which the atoms have collapsed for some reason -- probably under the weight of gravity -- and whose resultant density is so great that the object absorbs everything, even light. Reflecting no light, black holes cannot be seen; unapparent to perception, a black hole's density is nevertheless so great that it may weigh more than the sun, thoroughly invisible yet impenetrable, obstructionist, and highly destructive. Black holes consume everything and emit nothing.

Such is the case of literacy considered without the "p." Any discussion that fails to acknowledge the political basis of literacy collapses the concept into a veritable black hole that not only emits no light but whose energy is so great that it absorbs everything around it. With literacy so apolitically formulated, it becomes possible to talk about "a thousand points of light" without emitting any, or to be the "education president" without being able to illuminate what that could possibly mean. Such discourse admits of "building a bridge to the future" but offers no vision of that future nor any material means for its construction. Finally, as physicists tell us, black holes are dangerous, threatening to destroy everything that comes within their gravita-

22 Bilingual Education

Robert E. Bahruth Boise State University

In a recent visit to a "blue-ribbon school" in Texas, a Hispanic administrator paraded a fourth-grade student before a group of visitors to illustrate the success of his "bilingual education" program. When the child began school, he could not speak a word of English. For our benefit, the boy sat down in front of a computer and began working on a program in English, dealing with anatomy and the human skeletal system. He told us in English that he wanted to be a doctor.

When a series of questions were put to the boy in Spanish, his primary language, the interaction proved revealing and a cause for concern. The boy only responded in English. When asked whether he knew the names of the bones in Spanish, he replied, "Why would I want to?" It seems he had received the message that only English is of worth at school -- to be successful and rewarded he must abandon his first language and culture. A brief look around the library in this 85% Hispanic school provided supporting evidence. The stacks were filled with books in English, except for a scant, low-quality selection of books on a shelf tucked away in the corner.

Can we call a program bilingual if the final interpretation of success affirms monolingualism? One might argue that the school is in compliance with the state law in Texas that emphasizes transition to English as soon as possible. One must inquire, Who makes the laws? Whose interests do these lawmakers represent? The child's? According to Romaine ( 1995), if transitional bilingual education produces unsatisfactory results, we blame it and

23 Cultural Literacy

Donaldo Macedo University of Massachusetts

Although multicultural education is now very much in vogue in the United States, it often emphasizes the teaching of cultural tolerance so as to disarticulate multicultural pedagogy from a form of cultural politics. In my analysis in this chapter, multicultural education becomes a meaningful construct to the degree that it is viewed as a set of practices that function to either empower or disempower people. In the larger sense, multicultural education is analyzed according to whether it serves to reproduce existing social formations or serves as a set of cultural practices that promote democratic and emancipatory change. For this reason, I examine multicultural education in light of theories of cultural production and reproduction. I also argue more strongly for the deconstruction of the very language used in the multicultural debate as a prerequisite to the development of any meaningful multicultural pedagogy that purports to serve as the means to a critical appropriation of one's own culture and history.

Within the last decade, the issue of multicultural education has taken on a new importance among educators. Unfortunately, the debate that has emerged tends to recycle old assumptions and values regarding the meaning and usefulness of multicultural education. The notion that multicultural education is a matter of learning cultural characteristics about the "other" that will lead to cultural tolerance still informs that vast majority of multicultural programs and manifests its logic in the renewed emphasis on the management of the cultural "other." In other words, let us learn more about

26 Social Studies Educatio

E. Wayne Ross State University of New York at Binghamton

Social studies has had a relatively brief and contentious history as a school subject. The fundamental content of the social studies curriculum -- the study of human enterprise across time and space -- has always been at the core of education; however, there continues to be a lack of an agreed-on definition of social studies.

One of the earliest uses of the term "social studies" to refer to school subjects is attributed to Thomas Jesse Jones in an article that appeared in the Southern Workman in 1905 ( Tabachnick, 1991). Jones expanded the article into a book, Social Studies in the Hampton Curriculum, in which he expressed his concern that young African Americans and Native Americans "would never be able to become integral members of the broader society unless they learned to understand that society, the social forces that operated within it, and ways to recognize and respond to social power" ( Tabachnick, 1991, p. 725).

The roots of the contemporary social studies curriculum are found in the 1916 report of the Committee on Social Studies of the National Education Association's Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Schools, which Jones chaired. The final report of the committee, The Social Studies in Secondary Education, illustrates the influence of previous National Education Association and American Historical Association committees regarding history in schools (e.g., Committee of Seven, 1899), but it also emphasized the development of students' citizenship values and established

27 Moral Education

David E. Purpel University of North Carolina-Greensboro

The phrase "moral education" is a deceptively benign term, one that unfortunately has been used more as a rhetorical club than as a heuristic device. At its most innocent, the term can be used to describe the educational processes by which moral understandings and beliefs are taught and learned. In this virginal form, "moral" is meant to refer to preferred, idealized, or accepted modes of human relationships, that is, ways in which people should live with each other. This is only to speak to the obvious, namely, that all communities develop norms of acceptable social behavior as well as ways of imparting and enforcing them. Beyond this elemental level of meaning are, of course, issues of enormous import and controversy, since they involve conflicting views on some of the most important issues of human existence, indeed the kind of controversies that can and do engender bitter and even violent disputes.

Part of the controversy has to do with theories of the origin of moral frameworks -- some insisting on them as originating in some form of divine revelation whereas others are equally sure that they represent purely human and social invention and construction. This difference goes far beyond the academic and the theoretical, as they also have enormous political significance not only as they generate the criteria for setting social policies but in influencing the question of who gets to shape and determine them. Obviously, these disputes are continuously contested in various social and cultural settings, with education being a particularly sensitive and critical area.

28 Service Learning

George Perreault University of Nevada, Reno

One of the more noticeable trends in contemporary American education has been the growth of service learning activities in the public schools; indeed, nearly half the states now require some form of community service for high school graduation. Two important goals are cited to legitimate this expansion of the curriculum: "Learning and service are both vital outcomes in service learning, which narrows the gap between what students do in school and what they do after they leave school" ( Follman, Watkins, & Wilkes, 1994, p. x). Rahima C. Wade ( 1994), a frequent publisher in the field, notes that students in such programs, "are developing firsthand knowledge about what it means to make a difference; at the same time they are learning valuable personal, social, and academic skills" (p. 1).

The inclusion of experiential community services to enhance student learning is not a new concept; Dewey ( 1900/ 1956), for one, believed in the value of critically assessing and responding to authentic problems, but the ideal of service learning has gained support recently both from within the educational community and from various agencies, public and private. Goodlad ( 1984) suggested community service as one of the ways to strengthen schools, a recommendation echoed by several others ( Bryk & Driscoll, 1988; Lightfoot, 1983; Rutter, Mauglian, Mortimore, & Ouston, 1979). Boyer ( 1983) encouraged educators to require 120 hours of community service of students before graduation from high school, and Harrison ( 1987) supported that position by adding the weight of the Carengie Foun-

29 Environmental Education

C. A. Bowers Portland State University

The words "environmental education" carry layers of cultural baggage that severely limit our understanding of the radical implications these words should have for curriculum reform at all levels of education and especially in the areas of teacher education and graduate studies in education. The word "environment" still reproduces the dominant Western schemata that represents humans as separate from plants, animals, topsoil, and the rest of the biota. Learning about the environment too often becomes a matter of participating in the scientific gaze that illuminates changes occurring in natural systems. Studying the changes in the chemical properties of streams, observing the interactions between various natural systems, and, in the more systemic approaches to environmental education, investigating the source of toxic wastes represent both the mainstream approach to environmental education and the continuing influence of science as the dominant paradigm for understanding.

Although the scientific understanding of changes in natural systems is vitally important to all levels of environmental education, it nevertheless has a limiting influence that helps perpetuate the current double bind of accelerating global demands on the environment that, in turn, place even greater pressures on scientists to provide eco-management technologies. Science is an indispensable way of knowing, but it also contributes to the ecological crisis in ways that have been largely ignored by educators and, more generally, by the various groups that make up the environmental

30 Global Education

Robin Good Madhu Suri Prakash The Pennsylvania State University

Global education, like global thinking and the global economy, is a western, modern concept, reflecting the paradigm of industrial society. Wolfgang Sachs ( 1992) calls the conceptual framework of modern industrialized societies the "development model of reality." He describes the "development discourse," the language that comprises the modern industrialized paradigm. The words, concepts, and terminologies of this language include the following key terms: development, global, market, nation-state, needs, production, profit, progress, resources, scarcity, science, standard of living, and technology. These words and concepts form the primary root assumptions of the modern industrialized paradigm. Global education promotes this paradigm in the classrooms of the world, stretching north, South, east, and west.

Foremost in the development model of reality is the elevation of economic activity to a central role in modern society. These economic assumptions have not only been absorbed, but many scholars contend that economics has become like a new religion, that is, economists are viewed as the ultimate authorities, and economic laws are viewed as the laws of the universe ( Bowers, 1993; Esteva, 1992; Illich, 1978, 1992; Orr, 1992; Sachs, 1992a; Shiva, 1992).

Spend time in the American culture, and it is quickly evident that the shopping mall is a symbol of the primacy of economics and consumerism. It

31 SCIENCE EDUCATION

Helen Parke Charles R. Coble East Carolina University

C. P. Snow ( 1959) was among the first to warn. of the perils of the two cultures developing in society, a small number of scientifically knowledgeable individuals within the larger scientifically illiterate society:

It is dangerous to have two cultures which can't or don't communicate. In a time when science is determining much of our destiny, that is, whether we live or die, it is dangerous in the most practical terms. Scientists can give bad advice and decision-makers can't know whether it is good or bad. On the other hand, scientists in a divided culture provide a knowledge of some potentialities which is theirs alone. All this makes the political process more complex, and in some ways more dangerous, than we should be prepared to tolerate for long, either for the purposes of avoiding disasters, or for fulfilling -- what is waiting as a challenge to our conscience and goodwill -- a definable social hope. (p. 98)

Snow warned that when the two cultures grow apart, the society does not act out of wisdom. The rich living along side but essentially ignoring the existence of the poor, who need not be poor in a world with so much abundance. Aligned to the scarcity mentality and the greed that sustains material poverty is a growing separation of the "haves and have-nots" regarding knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, that is becoming increasingly important to economic success in today's world.

32 Math Education

Maggie McBride Montana State University-Billings

Kathryn Ross Wayne Western Washington University

Several questions guide us when we teach classes: How do I encourage a student culture that values responsibility toward the environment; what would the morality of such a responsibility be? How do I as a person who is concerned about the environment create lessons and teach classes? How can my teaching render explicit the cultural assumptions of our modern worldview and bring these assumptions under critical interrogation with our students? How is local knowledge and the notion of community displaced in lessons? In teaching, at any level, how is it that we highlight an ecocentered view of the world rather than a human-centered (anthropocentric) view of the world?

In asking these questions, we need to look critically at the context or culture in which we teach. With some few exceptions (at Bates College and Evergreen College, for example), students continue to behave in such a way as to put us on notice that we implicitly expect competition among them for the best grades. Further, our institutional culture dictates that our teaching perpetuate the belief that the most legitimate expression of learning is that which we can measure with our midterms, finals, pop quizzes, spelling tests, and multiple choice questions. Indeed, all these common examples require little else from a student than a good short-term memory. In those classes in

33 Educational Computing

C. A. Bowers Portland State University

In her acclaimed book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle ( 1996) summarizes what appears to be a growing consensus among educators about the contribution that computers make to enhancing human life:

I have argued that Internet experiences help us to develop models of psychological well-being that are in a meaningful sense postmodern: They admit multiplicity and flexibility. They acknowledge the constructed nature of reality, self, and other. The Internet is not alone in encouraging such models. There are many places in our culture that do so. What they have in common is that they all suggest the value of approaching one's "story" in several ways and with fluid access to one's different aspects. We are encouraged to think of ourselves as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, flexible, and ever in process. (pp. 263-264)

She is indeed correct about the academic disciplines that increasingly take for granted what she describes as the "fluid, emergent, ... multiplicitous, flexible, and ever in process" view of the person now being represented as the ideal citizen of the information age. Turkle can be faulted, however, for not including educators on her list. Even before the vocabulary of postmodernism swept through the academic community, educators were urging that this view of the individual be made the basis of classroom practice. The fact that what Turkle envisions as the emancipatory potential of computers to liberate the individual from the constraints of time, space, and cultural traditions had already been embraced by educators representing the subfields of their discipline may account for why they have asked so few critical questions about a technology

34 Educational Technology

Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. University of Miami, Coral Cables

Educational technologies have shaped the discourse of education and schooling from its earliest history. Yet we pay little attention to these technologies and their meaning. In large part, educational technologies are taken for granted -- are assumed to be neutral, whether in the form of chalk and slate, manipulables such as building blocks or mathematical rods, textbooks and workbooks, or televisions and computers.

It is the argument of this chapter that educational technologies are not neutral but that they instead significantly shape and define what is discussed and how things are learned in our culture and schools. In pursuing this argument, I focus on one question: How do specific educational technologies shape and define the discourse of education and schooling? Education and schooling have always been shaped by the technologies used to teach and communicate information. During the Medieval period, the great scholastic universities such as Paris and Bologna developed their curriculums around the technology of the spoken word and the handwritten manuscript. Traveling scholars moved from one university to another as they sought the most knowledgeable experts in their field.

With the invention of moveable type during the late 15th century, the tradition of the wandering scholar gave way to the new educational technology of the book. With the introduction of relatively inexpensive and precisely reproducible print technology, it became possible to create definitive scientific and literary texts and to distribute them on a widespread basis. The student no longer needed to travel from university to university in order to obtain the wisdom of individual scholars. Instead, scholars' ideas

35 Technological Literacy

Mark D. Beatham Plattsburgh State University College

We must ... question the basic soundness of the current scientific and educational ideology, which is now pressing to shift the locus of human activity from the organic environment, the social group, and the human personality to the megamachine, considered as the ultimate expression of human intelligence -- divorced from the limitations and qualifications of organic existence. ( Mumford, 1972, p. 84)

Technology devotees consistently fail to notice that a technological culture favors mechanisms over humans and all other organic life. Neither are they able to recognize a logical relationship between the increasingly dehumanizing social scale (of cities, suburbs, bureaucracies, pop culture, and so forth), the maddening cultural pace, and the technical systems in which all are expected to interact daily. The technological culture escapes substantive criticism because of its symbolic, indeed mythic, quality. It symbolizes the most deeply held and cherished value of all "modern" cultures: the effort to control and manipulate all phenomena on the earth without moral consequences. This remote control ethic organizes all human and nonhuman elements into a super machine, a megamachine, that consumes all organic existence. Children born into the megamachine are taught the remote control ethic by living, working, and being schooled in a closed system of integrated technologies and techniques, increasingly disconnected from their own and other organic life. The system implicitly promises power without responsibility, for the price of organic integrity. The remote control ethic, which includes technology and the technique from which it springs, must

36 Media Literacy

Daniel Kmitta Miami University

David Barsamian once asked veteran media critic Noam Chomsky to assess the U.S. educational system as a potential source for providing students with the tools necessary for becoming media literate. Prefacing his response with a brief commentary on the history of state and corporate propaganda and its role in capitalist democracies such as the United States, Chomsky ( 1992) concludes that, "as to what the schools (presently) teach to defend people against this (propaganda), the answer is simple: zero. The schools," he contends, "are quite on the opposite side: they are part of the disinformation apparatus.... They are institutions for indoctrination, for imposing obedience, for blocking the possibility of independent thought, and they play an institutional role in a system of control and coercion" (pp. 61-62). In other words, the "institutional role" of the schools is nearly identical to the role that Chomsky is noted for attributing to the media. Given the similitary in their institutional roles, then, we should be cautious in our optimism for any government-mandated educational programs that would result in meaningful media literacy among students. "Real schools ought to provide people with techniques of self-defense," Chomsky argues, "but that would mean teaching the truth about the world and about the society, and schools couldn't survive very long if they did that" ( 1992, p. 62).

Supposing for a moment, however, that U.S. schools could successfully implement meaningful media literacy programs, an occasion that would require tremendous levels of sustained public activism, what sort of knowledge would a media literacy curriculum include? Though space prohibits an

37 Vocational Education

Joe L. Kincheloe CUNY -- Brooklyn College The Pennsylvania State University

Too often the study of vocational education has focused on the practice and technique of teaching while ignoring the larger purposes of vocational programs. At the same time the field neglects this consideration of purpose, it also omits the examination of the social, political, and economic context in which vocational education takes place. The nature of the work, the workings of the economy, the social impact of technology, and the ethics of business are not central concerns of the vocational field. This social, political, and economic context is especially important at the end of the 20th century, a time when many Americans have concluded that the present organization of our economic life threatens the continued existence of our democratic way of life ( Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swindler, & Tipton, 1991; DeVore, 1983). I begin with the assumption that present economic organization is unhealthy on many fronts. Indeed, corporations have gained inordinate power in the process creating an atmosphere of unfairness that especially affects students who choose vocational career paths. Because of this reality, vocational teachers and students more than anyone else must gain the ability to expose such injustice. To protect their own self-interest, they must understand the way power works to undermine our way of life, our values, and our sense of right and wrong.

The vocational education I envision produces students who are aware of these threats to democracy, who understand the culture of work, and who can articulate a vision of what work should be. For example, workers with a vision do not passively accept hazardous workplaces that produce toxic products which not only affect the health of the employees who produce

38 Adult and Continuing Education

Vivian Wilson Mott

East Carolina University

Adult education's first concern will always be helping individual adults to learn, to grow, to increase their capacities, to attain a richer and fuller life in their own terms. What adults want to learn and are constrained to learn, however, is generated by the social milieu in which they live. ( Hallenbeck, 1964)

Adult and continuing education is frequently viewed as a voluntary and hopeful activity, one in which autonomous adults are free to choose to participate for the purpose of achieving some personal sense of fulfillment, for bringing about improvement in their lives, or even for sake of leisure or recreation. Another lingering myth, derived from the legacy of our field, suggests that ours is a discipline committed to social service, if not transformation. We do have a long history, and there were -- and are -- educational efforts with profound and lasting effects, played out in response to significant social movements. Even before to the common usage of the term adult education and the official establishment of the discipline through the founding of the American Association of Adult Education in 1926, there were organized efforts focused on the education and training of adults: religious and civic education for new Americans in the 1600s; apprenticeship training for (primarily) young men in preparation for the industrial age; English language and citizenship training for immigrants in the early 1900s ( Stubblefield & Keane, 1994). And the adult educators of those earlier periods genuinely "and apparently without question" perceived those offerings as an effective and advantageous means of acculturation and assimilation, progress and development in a developing nation. Now at the close of this

III Terms of Resistance

39 Critical Pedagogy ^*

Peter McLaren University of California at Los Angeles

Critical pedagogy is a way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the relationships among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional structures of the school, and the social and material relations of the wider community, society, and nation-state. Developed by progressive teachers attempting to eliminate inequalities on the basis of social class, it has sparked a wide array of antisexist, antiracist, and antihomophobic classroom-based curricula and policy initiatives. Critical pedagogy has grown out of a number of theoretical developments such as Latin American philosophies of liberation; the pedagogy of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire; the social reconstructionists in the 1930s United States; the sociology of knowledge; the Frankfurt school of critical theory; feminist theory; and neo-Marxist cultural criticism. In more recent years, it has been taken up by educators influenced by Derridean deconstruction and poststructuralism. Yet at the level of classroom life, critical pedagogy is often seen as synonymous with whole language instruction, adult literacy programs, and new "constructivist" approaches to teaching and learning based on Vygotsky's work. Although critics of critical pedagogy often decry this educational approach for its idealist multiculturalism, its supporters, including Freire, have complained that critical pedagogy has often been domesticated and reduced to student-directed learning approaches devoid of social critique.

It is painfully evident that critical pedagogy and its political partner, multicultural education, no longer serve as an adequate social or pedagogical platform from which to mount a serious challenge to the current social division of

____________________

^*	An expanded version of this chapter is forthcoming in Educactional Technology.

-345

40 Postcolonialism

Bernardo P. Gallegos University of Chicago, Illinois

Excitement resonated throughout Los Angeles County as thousands of enraged Latino high school and junior high school students, mainly Mexican, stormed out of their classrooms and took to the streets waving Mexican flags, chanting, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." It was the fall of 1994, and the upcoming elections included a vote on the controversial and racist Proposition 187 (which has since passed). Proposition 187 threatened the "undocumented" with penalties and loss of invaluable services including medical care and education for youth. Just days earlier, Aztec dancers, also waving Mexican flags, led upward of 100 thousand marchers from east Los Angeles to downtown. The events, well publicized in the media with a barrage of front page photos of brown bodies waving Mexican flags, left the voting public (mainly European Americans) bewildered as to why these immigrants would wave Mexican flags while protesting the proposition within the United States. Several letters to the editor in the Los Angeles Times expressed great disapproval at the waving of Mexican flags on "American" soil. A European American policeman (a helicopter pilot) who worked surveillance from the air during the student demonstrations actually suggested to me that it was the waving of the Mexican flags that ensured the passage of the proposition and furthermore recommended that "we" (a point I will discuss later) had better learn to control our kids.

What was apparently incomprehensible to the voters and letter writers was the depth of the rage of the protesters, including me. How dare these Europeans now residing on the American continent attempt to restrict the movements of the descendants of the native peoples? Have they forgotten

41 Critical Race Theory ^*

Gloria Ladson Billings University of Wisconsin, Madison

According to Delgado ( 1995), "Critical Race Theory sprang up in the mid-1970s with the early work of Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman, both of whom were deeply distressed over the slow pace of racial reform in the United States" (p. xiii). They argued that the traditional approaches of filing amicus briefs, protests, marching, and appealing to the moral sensibilities of decent citizens produced smaller and fewer gains than in previous times. Before long they were being joined by other legal scholars who shared their frustration with traditional civil rights strategies.

Critical race theory (CRT) is both an outgrowth of and a separate entity from an earlier legal movement called critical legal studies (CLS). Critical legal studies is a leftist legal movement that challenged the traditional legal scholarship that focused on doctrinal and policy analysis ( Gordon, 1990) in favor of a form of law that spoke to the specificity of individuals and groups in social and cultural contexts. Critical legal studies scholars also challenged the notion that the civil rights struggle represents a long, steady march toward social transformation" (Crenshaw, 1988, p. 1334).

According to Crenshaw ( 1988), "Critical [legal] scholars have attempted to analyze legal ideology and discourse as a social artifact which operates to recreate and legitimate American society" (p. 1350). Scholars in the CLS movement decipher legal doctrine to expose both its internal and external inconsistencies and reveal the ways that "legal ideology has helped

____________________

^*	This chapter is adapted from a manuscript written by the author entitled, "Just what is critical race theory and what's it doing in a nice field like education" which is currently under review for publication.

42 Critical Feminist Pedagogy

Jeanne F. Brady The Pennsylvania State University

Feminist theory has radically evolved over the past 30 years. Feminism today, in its political, practical, and theoretical realms, represents divergent interpretations to many people. More recently a postmodern feminist theory has provided space to embrace multiple positions so as not to define feminism as one conception or to create binarisms by placing one position in opposition to another. It allows for multiple positions of difference and diversity while at the same time supports an overarching feminist philosophy that challenges us to think and act in particular ways. More specifically, it links the cultural politics of difference and identity with the social politics of justice and equality. In this sense, postmodern feminism represents a politics in which people actively participate in the shaping of theories and practices of liberation by acknowledging both diversity and unity and at the same time focusing on the lives of the people who work and live in a multiracial and multicultural society.

Historically, the U.S. feminist debate was formulated in an attempt to identify and describe women's oppression, to theorize its foundations and effects, and to conceive ways to generate strategies for women's liberation. It is no less important today that we acknowledge and challenge the specific gendered realities of oppression and exploitation. Yet, it is worth noting that focusing on shared forms of oppression is neither unproblematic nor is it the only basis on which feminists can develop a politics of solidarity. Rather, I would emphasize that women should question their shared victimage as the essential location of injustice, since this reflects male supremacist thinking that to be female is to be victim. Instead, women should organize around

43 Biocentric Education

Robin Good Madhu Suri Prakash Pennsylvania State University

Where we are, we stand in relationship to others [and the natural world], part of a dialogue, fibers of an intricate web that spins itself into the fabric. ( Krall, 1994)

Becoming dwellers on the human scale involves a shift in paradigm from the modern developmental framework to a postmodern constructive biocentric model of reality. The assumptions of a biocentric framework rest on the primacy of nurturing and sustaining life. Words such as interconnectedness, interdependence, interdisciplinary, interactive, holistic, dynamic, and dialectical comprise the fundamental discourse of the humanity-through-nature paradigm. In contrast to the humanity-over-nature paradigm, which likens the universe to a knowable and predictable machine, the holistic paradigm emphasizes a systems view of life. The biocentric approach looks at the world in terms of relationships and integration. These relationships are perceived as dynamic, interactive, and dialectical, providing both context and meaning to the human experience ( Gang, 1989).

In this holistic construct, humans view themselves as part of a dynamic pattern that interconnects people and the biotic community. From this interconnection arises well-being; the health of the whole is contingent upon the health of the parts, and the health of the parts is contingent upon the health of the whole. This mutuality and reciprocity call for a moral code that strives to preserve and nurture the integrity of those relationships. This requires living on the human scale, rediscovering and reestablishing sus-

44 Situated Cognition

David Kirshner Louisiana State University

James A. Whitson University of Delaware

Part of what makes a book like this viable is the systemic nature of the pervasive tendency to interpret education in the terms of economic development. This is not a unitary project of sly conspirators but a consequence of a certain worldview, deeply entrenched in Western culture, and pervading all aspects of our social and intellectual life. And so too must the resistances to economization share certain connections or linkages -- notwithstanding differences of purpose or method. Thus, the delights of this book are bound to include a cascade of unanticipated connections forming among the diverse topics encountered.

This chapter takes as its explicit challenge to facilitate such connections by presenting situated cognition theory against the backdrop of our culture's common sense that uncritically embraces a view of knowledge as information (a commodity to be transferred or bartered), learning as accumulating knowledge, and thinking as the transformation or processing of information.

In this view, education is not just being interpreted as metaphorically comparable to market economics; it is being viewed (and, increasingly, managed) as just another instance of market economics -- with knowledge, learning, and thinking taken, respectively, as examples of marketable com-

45 Individualization

Lislie A. Sassone Northern Illinois University

The notion that individualization should be a primary educational goal is distinctively modern and romantic. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Emile, the first work in educational philosophy that makes individualization an educational aim, is founded on the distinction between two forms of self-love -- amour propre and amor de soi. Amour propre is based on comparative judgments of inferiority and superiority and is a fully socialized concept, whereas amour de soi is a primary love of one's own life and capacities and a will to express those capacities. Rousseau ( 1974) pedagogy in Emile attempts to allow an individual to emerge who has not been trained to base his self-estimation on prevailing social standards, but instead on his own personal development. Amour de soi is the kernel of individualization.

Through the 19th century, educators and educational theorists associated with romanticism developed and applied Rousseau's paradigm. Henri Pestalozzi adapted the emphasis on individualized development to the school setting. Max Stirner radicalized amour de soi into a pedagogy based on individual expressivity. The second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th would later bring the educational implications of individualization of Friedrich Nietzsche and John Dewey to their modern(ist) fruition.

In Nietzsche's ( 1967) hands, individualization is a complex term. It refers to a being in-and-for-oneself, who with reflective awareness realizes his or her particular virtues that paradoxically, often come to be only from de-

46 Dialogue

Nicholas C. Burbules University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dialogue is not just another term for talk. In the Western tradition of educational thought, dialogue has served as a prescriptive ideal pointing to a particular type of communicative interaction thought to have special, even unique, educational potential. We see one account of dialogue in the work of Plato, another in the work of Paulo Freire. These two accounts differ in many respects -- their views of knowledge, of the aimms of education, and certainly of the merits of democracy: Freire is a radical democrat, Plato extremely suspicious of democracy. But they share the idea that there is something intrinsic to the dialogical process, the process of questioning, doubting, reexamining assumptions, clarifying meanings, and so forth that joins partners in a teaching -- learning relation in which, together, they can unlearn the falsehoods they might be burdened with and reconstruct a truer, fuller understanding of their worlds. For both Plato and Freire, this relation has emancipatory potential.

Elsewhere, I have suggested that this dialogical relation can take at least four distinct forms ( Burbules, 1993). These forms depend on certain assumptions about (1) the nature of the investigation at hand (whether discussion should converge on a single answer, solution, or compromise, or diverge into a range of possibilities and points of view, all potentially of value) and (2) the nature of the relation among the dialogue's participants (whether critical discussion is thought likely to cull unacceptable alternatives from consideration through skeptical questions, or whether a more inclusive dialogue is favored, as a way of drawing in participants who might otherwise be alienated or intimidated by a more aggressive mode of interac-

47 Public Franchise

Jeffrey Williams University of Missouri

A couple of years ago, at the faculty convocation inaugurating the school year, the dean of arts and sciences at the public university where I then taught urged us to go thence and seek grants, to "market the college to alumni and friends of the university," and to forge "partnerships" with local business (e.g., Glaxo/Wellcome, which very profitably manufactures AZT in Greenville, and the like). While I usually slouch in the back and whisper to my friends -- such events bring out my adolescent defiance, like misbehaving in church -- I sat up and took notice. The year before the theme had been "excellence," in scholarship and teaching, the kind of predictable if fatuous motivational rhetoric one expects at such events, particularly since university administrators have started going to management seminars. But this was different and announced a more concrete imperative. The dean had previously been an enthusiastic defender of the humanities and the values of traditional scholarship, extolling us to publish more to boost our "bibliographies" and hence our "national reputation" -- his cheerleading toward the vague vista of "excellence" fit consistently with this -- whereas now he seemed to be advising us to get out of our library carrels and start hawking our wares, trading vita lines for a more tangible bottomline, and afterward he instituted a policy that we now receive publication credit on our yearly evaluations for grants submitted, four grants equaling an article.

The dean's speech prompted one of my colleagues to suggest that rather than our being the indirect and occasional conduits of grants and donations we streamline the process and simply stop, say, every half hour in class and give a 1 minute pitch for the local McDonald's, or Wendy's, or Hardee's, or Burger King, which line the perimeter of campus. We proceeded to draw