This diary is a response to and commentary on Stanley Fish's new article online at the New York Times:
A Classical Education: Back to the Future
It's a great article, and you should read it in full.
I'm quoting the concluding paragraphs here:
Ravitch, like Nussbaum, finds little hope in the policies of President Obama, who promised change but seems to have picked up “the same banner of choice, competition, and markets that had been the hallmark of his predecessors.” The result is that we continue to see “the shrinking of time available to teach anything other than reading and math; other subjects, including history, science, the arts, geography, even recess, were curtailed.”
Ravitch’s recommendations are simple, commonsensical and entirely consonant with the views of Bortins and Nussbaum. Begin with “a well conceived, coherent, sequential curriculum,” and then “adjust other parts of the education system to support the goals of learning.” This will produce a “foundation of knowledge and skills that grows stronger each year.” Forget about the latest fad and quick-fix, and buckle down to the time-honored, traditional “study and practice of the liberal arts and sciences: history, literature, geography, the sciences, civics mathematics, the arts and foreign languages.”
In short, get knowledgeable and well-trained teachers, equip them with a carefully calibrated curriculum and a syllabus filled with challenging texts and materials, and put them in a room with students who are told where they are going and how they are going to get there.
I'm not really sure how anyone could argue against Fish here. I mean, I don't think I would ever come down on the "hard" side of his argument, teaching a strict Classical education, and certainly he doesn't understand the privilege that he must have had growing up to be in such a curriculum (but what would you expect from a guy who wrote, "Save the World on Your Own Time"), but in education there is definitely too much focus on testing and not enough on critical thinking. However, saying all that, I can't wait 'til I have an extra $10,000 to blow on a complete Loeb Classical Library.
But I think that there is a fundamental ideological difference that Fish could've brought up, and that is between Humanism and Capitalism. If one considers the ideologies present at the founding of America, it's obvious that these two have always been entwined in our legal system and always in tension with one another. The debate between the two might be categorized as what precisely counts as a fundamental skill. The skills needed to perform basic capitalist functions vary widely, and range from simply being able to read safety signs and directions, do basic math, and (most importantly) take orders well, to being able to converse with businesses across the world and manage mathematical equations that are so complex that they are at the forefront of many academic disciplines. Thus, we could view the class-structure that expresses itself in certain schools performing better and others performing worse as perfectly natural. Standardized testing, while having the appearance of making kids smarter, will actually just further entrench this system.
But what is different from the capitalist fundamental and the liberal/humanist fundamental is not really critical thinking but rather the difference between self-interest and disinterestedness. Promotion is always the primary objective for the individual (whether as a person or a company) within capitalism. It is how you present yourself to an employer that gets you hired. When one eventually becomes an owner, self-interest is what guides all future decisions and any future education one might need. The goal of humanism, however, is not thinking about what is best for the self, but simply what is best and, further, what is. Anyone in the world can participate in such a discourse because there is no capital that is fundamentally necessary to thought. Or so it goes.
So the difference between the two is the concept of precisely what critical thinking is: is it "How do I determine how to get ahead?" or is it "How do I determine what is right and best?" The latter question is much more easily attackable because there is no pre-existing authority to which one can appeal, and its ideal formulation is simply that, an ideal. It does not recognize that bias must necessarily be introduced into a system. The former question simply (to us, through naturalization/internalization/smoke and mirrors) seems self-evident, and does have its own philosophical, Cartesian basis: I think, therefore I am; I am, therefore I can appeal to myself. All while still claiming to be an ideal.
But we should defend ideal formulations because they force us to think constantly about improving ourselves. The "bias" question can be solved, at least to a great extent, through discourse, through public space. The fact that our public spaces are dying with increasing rapidity (the closing of libraries, the intense amounts of special interests in Congress) shows that, even if people were taught a "classical" humanistic education, they would not be able to use it, or would use it selfishly. Socratic argument requires another person; Capitalist argument requires only a spreadsheet and an equation, that is, it is self-checkable.
Simply put, for our education system to change, we would need a massive (infra)structural and ideological change in our society. Perhaps if we educated our students in humanistic rather than capitalistic critical modes, they would eventually vote for a more humanistic set of politicians, but the amount of corporate interest in Congress makes that unlikely. So what are we to do?
A friend of mine suggested that the problem was in funding and getting "good teachers" to begin with before we even start discussing a curriculum and content change. My response was that while we're worrying about funding and teaching (non-content), the capitalist class, because it owns capital, is tying funding up with its very curriculum, so the idea becomes, "Hey school district, if you want funding, you need to open so many charter schools," or, "Hey school, if you want funding your students need to improve every year on this exam." Because the state/test curriculum is established politically, the curriculum is literally tied to the funding, as is the method of teaching. We lament how "there aren't good teachers" but the fact is that no one's allowed to be a "good teacher" (at least in lower-income schoools) because they have to teach a very certain way. And never mind that because income is related to school performance, lower performing kids are pushed into the public school system, which means those teachers have to do double duty. Charter schools, a major part of Obama's education redesign, simply exasperate that problem.
So again, what are we to do?
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PS (full disclosure?): I certainly have my own interests in this debate. I want to be an English professor and will soon be starting my Ph.D. coursework. I, of course, want there to be jobs available to me when I finish my doctoral, but I also want to be able to teach students who are excited about literature. But, sincerely, I think that without a strong background in the humanities, we can't have a well-informed and critical citizenry, and I see that as my first duty as a future teacher, to help in my own way to create a better, more democratic society.