It’s interesting to discover one’s unexamined assumptions in the middle of a class lesson. Sometimes the blank stares and raised eyebrows can be ignored as simply the default attitude of American students. But when stopped in the middle of  a brilliant explication of Robert Paxton’s analysis of fascism as a bridge between Left and Right by a question so unexpected and so indexical, the edukator must take pause, and search his stock of knowledge for the means by which to mask his profound surprise, and mitigate his immediate tendency to call his students ignoramuses. Remembering always that ignorance is not a sin, and should be remedied. The question: What are Left and Right? Where to begin….

My eleventh graders in Morocco and Turkey and  Germany knew the answer(s). Their educational background and parental guidance guaranteed that this critical shorthand for understanding 2oth Century history had been mastered at an early age. It is with a sense of wonder that I recall how sophisticated so many of them were (and are) about the ideological struggles that divide(d) the modern world, and about the place of their country (and their families) in the discourse about the nature of the political good that is the grounding of the Left-Right dichotomy. Their conceptual understanding was rooted in their history and in the lessons they had learned about,and from, it; they had the framework for the development of the historical imagination that their secondary school program was designed to shape and sharpen. When one starts from so propitious a position, teaching is easy, and fun, and fulfilling of that intellectual challenge to which we as teachers should always be drawn. When one does not, the prospect is daunting.

Not because these ideas can’ t be taught. Obviously they can, and are. But when a seventeen-year old upper middle-class child at a posh and expensive private school cannot identify the fundamental categories of 20th century political history and philosophy, one wonders to what cause the slippage might be laid. How can one have passed United States History ( a state requirement for American students everywhere) without having at least mentioned the Cold War? How can the New Deal and the opposition to it be understood without some reference to the ideological confrontation its instauration engendered? What meaning can be construed from the labels liberal or conservative without the background provided by the Left-Right orientation? My recent experience has suggested that much of what amazes foreigners about American political life – the emptiness of political rhetoric, the obssessive focus on personality rather than policy, the ludicrous misunderstandings of basic terms like socialism and fascism – is first nurtured in the classrooms and public arenas from which politics has been effectively extinguished. There is, to be sure, much excited noise that sounds like political speech, and much posturing that seems to embody it. But as Tony Judt has so eloquently demonstrated in his last book, the questions that are properly the stuff of politics have been largely silenced,  elided into a triumphalist discourse in which the only terms of value are economic. That, too, is more visible in the classroom than I remember it to be, but that’s a different story.

A short irrelevant intervention provoked by something recently read here. How do we on the Left explain/excuse/alibi the seeming inability/unwillingness of “the masses” to recognize their own objective interests as we understand them, and thus their failure to act/vote/protest as we think/hope/prophecy they should? The analysis of choice ever since Marx refined the concept so carefully has been the power of ideology, and the monopoly on the definition of reality that its mastery instantiates; my own students respond better to Gramsci’s imaginative updating of the Marxian foundation, with its emphasis on the colonization of consciousness and the manufacture of consent. But a few weeks back in the United States, after four years away, makes me again suspicious of this very deliberate attempt to obviate responsibility and ignore the agency evidenced by precisely those political actors on whom, so the theory goes, the future depends. What is it, precisely, that allows us to see the world so clearly, and appreciate the partiality of all points of view (and especially our own) so generously, but seems to disenfranchise our comrades to the point where they are eager to accept rank falsehood and blatant dishonesty as the way things really are? If there is a dominant ideology (and there is), why is that fact so obvious to us, and so elusive for all those equally subject to its mystifications? Surely, if Americans are as smart as they are constantly told they are, and if the same information sources out of which the Left’s worldview is constructed are equally available to anyone with a modem and a library card, the failure of the Left program (in even its most anodyne formulations) to displace the lies and obfuscations of the Right cannot be simply sloughed off as “a failure to connect.” As economic crisis bites harder on that vast pseudo-middle-class that is the avatar of the Left imaginary, where is the outrage and intelligent action, the praxis, that will transform the social dynamic and train absent energies toward effective avenues of progressive change? The Right has always been able to channel that angst into action, and so it is no surprise to hear the echoes of fascism in the rhetoric of the Tea Party and the programs of the corrupted liberal elites throughout the globalized casino of market capitalism; but why are the few serious alternatives in Latin America and elsewhere so largely unknown and so thoroughly misunderstood? Where is the filtering mechanism that masks the availability of dissident voices? They are present, and in the relatively free environment of the liberal state, they are accessible; why is it only on the Right that those voices have become, to some extent, the mainstream?

I have some ideas about the what the answers might be, how the education we have provided our children has primed the pump of slothful ignorance from which contemporary politics largely flows. When I isolate the best examples for illustration, I’ll come back to this.

This marvelous and ironic observation is played straight in the New York Times, and in the process is drained of both meaning and insight.  It is not the lack of recognition of diversity that is the problem: it is precisely the act of recognition, and the animosity inspired by that, that has led, and continues to lead, to fear and paranoia and slaughter. Because the reality is that for many people, in many places, diversity is a spur to violence and confrontation; the more vigorously it is proclaimed and the more ostentatiously it is displayed, the more viciously it is repressed, and the more acute becomes awareness that difference matters, and that when times get tough, difference divides. So if diversity must mean accommodation and acceptance, if it must mean moving beyond tolerance and embracing that which sets itself apart, then it exists in only a few places, and there only tentatively. But which is the more outrageous position: that diversity is good, or that is, at best, tolerable? Obviously, the answer depends on where one stands, and why.

In Turkey, at  a school populated by a small number of foreigners and a huge majority of wealthy Turks, diversity was a conscious intention of the largely American administration, and a standing joke amongst the students of both communities. For the foreigners (the Turkish word yabanci carries an unpleasant, and entirely intentional , sense of unwanted or unclean), diversity meant that they could never feel a real part of the school community from which their own national consciousness by definition excluded them. Most of them had close friendships with their Turkish classmates, and many of them spoke fluent Turkish, but that was insufficient to overcome the barrier of difference that is a defining characteristic of Turkish mentalite. Our students were unusually cosmopolitan, but embedded into the Turkish elite culture to which I had access was the apodictic belief that Turkishness was available only to those who could claim it by birthright.

And not always to them. The division between real Turks, the secular elite who saw their roots in the national project of Ataturk, and the Muslim Turks whose political party had taken power only recently, was absolute. For an outsider, it was strange and fascinating to eavesdrop on a cultural argument between protagonists who, from my position, were members of the same national group, but who, for each other, might as well have been from different planets. And there was no sense that this cultural (and class) divide could, or should, be breached. The argument my students proposed is an important one, because it points to the inevitable contradictions of diversity, American style, contradictions perhaps more real (or more evident) in places where ideas matter.

When, like a good western liberal, I suggested that their fear and dislike of demonstrative Muslim religiosity (especially the wearing of the hijab, forbidden at public universities but tolerated at the private institution which governed our high school) was an unsupportable prejudice, I was forcefully informed that I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about. If we allow them to veil, insisted one young woman, how long will it be before we will all have to? From my point of view, this seemed alarmist and paranoid, but the girls in the class were unanimous: To give an inch on a fundamental plank of the Kemalist platform was to start down the slippery slope at the end of which lay Iran. Because the Islamist program allowed no dissenters: If diversity were encouraged by those now in power, they would pay the highest price when it was terminated by those whom they had so carelessly indulged. This was not a matter of everyone to their own, which is what American-style diversity talk assumes. It was a struggle between incompatible ideologies: any gain by one side entailed a loss for the other. Their history, their political socialization, their identities were structured differently than mine. And on what grounds could I even begin to protest that they were wrong?

Because there are, in fact, unresolvable contradictions that most diversity programs attempt to finesse. If my cultural identity insists that modesty must prevail in female dress, and that it is unbearably offensive to my religious sensibility if it is not, whose offense will be protected, mine or hers, when she insists that how she dresses is none of my bloody business? If diversity training insists that I must embrace her difference, how can that be done, and my own integrity maintained? The weird idea that I am entitled to my absolutist ideas and that no one is truly constrained by my instantiating them is pious nonsense: Ideas have consequences, and it is only when those consequences are studiously ignored, that diversity becomes a non-problematic concept. And that is, it has just occurred to me, why it is only in the United States that such an idea could arise, and be propagated. Because here (there?) ideas don’t matter, unless and until they truly challenge those whose interests the structures of dominant ideology are designed to protect.

A recent job interview during which, for the first time in a long career, I was asked where I stood on the diversity front, encouraged what I hope will prove a useful excursion into the ideological realms wherein diversity talk flourishes. I want to defend two propositions: (1) the American use of the term is peculiar to American culture, but is assumed by those who use it to be universal; and (2) the valorization of the concept, its acceptance as a benefice per se, is challenged in U.S. educational circles only by those on the Right for whom it poses a threat to hegemonic discourses and social locations. Elsewhere, and this is where my international experience is most telling, things are seen differently and positions assumed to be self-evident here are simply not. I think there are both philosophical and practical/political implications to my argument, but I am interested here only in constructing a framework for discussion, to which I hope others might contribute.

A quick Google search uncovered this exemplary definition of the term:

The concept of diversity encompasses acceptance and respect.
It means understanding that each individual is unique,
and recognizing our individual differences.  These can be along
the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs,
political beliefs, or other ideologies.  It is the exploration
of these differences in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. It is about understanding each other and moving beyond simple tolerance to embracing and celebrating the rich dimensions of diversity contained within each individual.

Note first how what purports to be a definition is in fact a prescription for attitude and behavior: If one rejects the attitude, and strips the definition of its positive moral charge, there is a kernel of real categorization that might be examined. It is the unwillingness to make that separation, the insistence that before a thing (relationship) is defined, it must be positively valued, that sets the American definition apart. What could be more concisely characterized as a reality of difference is sentimentalized and mystified for no explicit reason.

Difference, along all the dimensions identified in the passage, is a brute fact of life in the contemporary world. To reject it is to live in a fantasy land of nostalgic homogeneity, where all people are like you, and thus no notice need be taken of those markers of identity to which they may be attached.  But it is important to note that there is a difference between choosing to identify as a member of a marked category, and being identified by others who do not share the marker in question. The latter is the essence of stereotyping, the former is something else entirely; in the American educational universe especially, this difference has been conflated: It is assumed that these identity-markers are essential rather than contingent, and that they therefore must be a (or the) foundation for self-concept (be proud of being whatever) and self-presentation (be authentically who/what you are). What might be viewed as the narcissism of small differences is elevated to a higher moral plane, and those who refuse the personal investment in markers are belittled as poseurs and fakes (the epithets are legion, and lethal in contexts where the problematic in which they are embedded remains unchallenged).

This is emphatically not a claim that we are really, underneath it all, essentially the same (the level at which that is true is politically and philosophically irrelevant). It is instead a suggestion that one’s social and historical location overdetermines one’s conceptual categories. In America (more correctly, in segments of the social formation of the United States), diversity has become fetishized, i.e. it stands in for psychological/emotional contradictions that remain unrecognized or unresolved. The deeper the contradictions, the more intractable the conflicts, the more central the displacement mechanism becomes. The problem with a fetish is that it stands in the way of accurate and efficacious action: So much energy is wasted propitiating its demands, and so little to uncovering its motive source.

Obviously, this is to be continued…

A colleague recently received, from the administrator whose attitudes and behavior have most heavily contributed to the intellectual ennui of the last two years, the following message: The days are over when teachers can do whatever they want in the classroom. There are ways to measure their performance, and standardized tests [in this particular case, the ERB] that allow us to do that. The context here is important: The English department was claiming that what was being measured was NOTwhat really mattered in the development of writing skills, that the algorithm being used by the instant-response platform was giving students the mistaken impression that their writing was better than it was. In short, the teachers were asserting their professional judgment for the possession of which, it must be assumed, they had been hired. But because standardized tests are reliable, and teacher impressions idiosyncratic, their expertise must be trashed, and the dictates of the test obeyed . The necessity for measurement outweighs the question of what is being measured, the artifact usurps what it should properly represent, and is then reified so that it becomes the thing itself. And thus test scores stand for teacher competence, and the mystification process is complete, and completely circular.

It is by now commonplace that this process dominates the world of public education, at all levels from pre-K to university. Its most blatant exemplar is, perhaps, NCLB, but the idea that accurate measurement of educational progress can be achieved through the use of multiple-choice, machine-read examinations, is both more widespread and more deeply embedded in the educational culture of the United States. The evidence that such measurement has actually improved either teaching or learning is, to put it generously, not robust; but what is undeniable is that it has given to administrators a tool with which to pry apart the linkage between teaching and autonomy, and thus to enlist teachers in their own proletarianization by insisting that what cannot be measured does not really exist. In the pursuit of good test results, the fruits of teacher professionalism are crushed – and it is rarely mentioned that good test results are not the result of good tests. In such a universe of discourse, only the foolish or the fanatical dare maintain the claim that knowledge is more than the ability to fill in a bubble, that there are alternative competencies to those being so precisely measured. But the seduction of precision metrics, as powerful in the school as on the battlefield, undermines more nuanced appreciation, and teaching to the test becomes the more necessary as those responsible for it protest the tendency their policies have fostered.

There is much more to be said about this, but in support of a developing argument, I offer one piece of evidence from an unlikely source. I have for many years taught both the IB Diploma course in European history and the equivalent AP course. The AP European History exam covers the period from 1450 to the day before yesterday, and 50% of the exam grade is based on student response to 80 multiple-choice questions; the IB exam has no multiple-choice component, and instead is focused on those skills necessary to the actual practice of historical research: the critical analysis of documents and the construction of coherent arguments about what they mean. Instructors are encouraged to focus their courses on an historical era of 100 years: The goal is depth knowledge rather than breadth, understanding rather than memorization. Which measurement instrument best captures the skill of the instructor at eliciting historical knowledge and generating the intellectual excitement from which it flows? And which model of measurement provides best for the autonomous praxis of both teachers and students? I hope to answer these questions in a subsequent post.

I had been sitting in the Teacher’s Lounge, where I am wasting valuable hours fulfilling the requirement that I be at school even though there are neither classes nor exams, listening to my Mexican colleagues struggling with their assignment for the M.Ed. program in which they are enrolled. My Spanish is still primitive, but I could sense that whatever it was they were doing, its parameters were unclear, and its direction uncertain. And so, as the resident gringo and former university lecturer, I asked if I could help. Their problem is terrifyingly relevant to the autonomy theme I had intended to elaborate; once again, serendipity trumps forethought.

They had been asked to write four papers on various aspects of classroom management. The instructions for them were clear, if not as prescriptive or detailed as they might have been. It was obvious to me that the instructor’s aim was that they depend on the validity of their own perceptions, and apply the concepts they had read about to analyze and contextualize them.  But what was evident to me was completely opaque to them. They needed to know what he wanted, in the kind of exhaustive, non-negotiable detail that is becoming the norm in the contemporary classroom from kindergarten through to university. In the face of uncertain expectations, these experienced teachers, adults not children, were paralyzed by a lack of confidence in their own interpretive abilities. If they were not told precisely what to do, they could do nothing. And thus they are made dependent on authority, and their intellectual autonomy is forfeited. A disturbing experience, but perhaps a teachable moment.

Critical thinking is an autonomous act. One can, perhaps, tell a student to think critically, but one cannot, by definition, tell her what to think. But from what I have seen of teacher education, much of it consists of precisely that, e.g. you will think that differentiated instruction improves student learning, you will think that diversity is an unmitigated good, you will think that every lesson must be so carefully planned that each minute of the hour is predictively allotted. What you cannot think, if you wish to be taken seriously, is whether any of these claims are true. That is a bad thought, and is disruptive of the cowed consensus necessary to the continued propagation of nonsense.

When I inquired why it was that open-ended assignments made them so nervous, the consensus reply was, “We’re not used to that.” What then are they used to? That’s another post.

I will return to the autonomy issue soon. But something just happened that deserves a response that I want to make while the memory is still fresh. Today is graduation day at the new high school wherein I have toiled for two years; the guest speaker at the ceremony was a big name in the American educational universe, Dr. Michael F. Hogan, and his message was rapturously received by those colleagues with whom I sat, and by the graduates to whom it was, ostensibly, addressed. I know that all graduation speeches are ritual observances (I have delivered enough of them myself), and thus constrained by rhetorical  formula and short attention spans. And I know that the desired emotional effect is a soft sentimentality conjoined to a vague optimism that the lives of the graduates will be healthy, happy, and wondrously successful. But today’s exercise went beyond these conventions, and in the course of ten minutes, managed to misunderstand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, construct an alternative universe that made Pollyanna sound like Kierkegaard, and lie outrageously to our students about how their world works. I was-am-outraged, and this screed is the result. Bear with me.

In an attempt to emphasize the importance of attitude in the formation of successful life-strategies, the speaker enlisted Heisenberg thusly (the quotes are not, unfortunately, verbatim): the way you look at a situation changes the nature of the situation; therefore, if you change your attitude (i.e. become more optimistic), your situation will change. This is not, of course, what the Uncertainty Principle states. But by attaching a very American, positive-psychology mantra to an important scientific hypothesis, the vacuousness of the sentiment is mystified. For an audience whose acquaintance with quantum physics is at best tentative, this is a serious misdirection.

But then came the corollary, now grounded in the hardest science (an example, no doubt, of research-based practice): If you are pessimistic about your prospects, you will fail. If you are optimistic, you will succeed. And in seconds, the real world has disappeared, and the triumph of the will has been validated. I swear I am not making this up: in a world suffering from climate change, economic recession, structural unemployment, and atavistic war, all it takes to fulfill your dreams is to wish that it be so. Is this really the most relevant message to send at this historical conjuncture?  More importantly given the context: Is it in any way true? And what does its acceptance by young people (I refuse to accept that the speaker actually believes this!) portend for the future these children will have to make?  Optimism of the will is one thing, and helpful, but only if it is policed by pessimism of the intellect. What our graduates have been told is that will alone is sufficient. They have been cheated, and they have been deceived.

It is nearing the end of yet another teaching gig, and along with the very occasional fond memories of bright students met and new colleagues befriended comes an overwhelming intimation that at last, I have seen the future, and it does not work. Up until this latest experience, I have worked in places and with people for whom the jargon and pretenses of education-school religion have been at most a distraction from more serious concerns. It is one of the pleasures of private-school teaching that the diktats of educational policy and reform can be often avoided if those in charge are sufficiently confident, and those whom they hire sufficiently competent. The ability to avoid state-mandated testing, while an undeniable boon to the less-able amongst the privileged, is also a bulwark against the fetishes for measurement and accountability increasingly worshipped in the public domain. As always, elites shape the culture to benefit themselves and to make it as unlikely as possible that those of inferior status will successfully challenge their subordination. This is, of course, morally indefensible, and in a truly civilized world private schooling would be forbidden; but I wonder whether a closer examination of what the private school provides might prove a useful tool for those trying to understand how and why the more “qualified” public-school teachers become, and the more closely their conduct is monitored and measured, the worse things get, and the wider grows the gap between the haves and have-nots.

I’m not concerned here with the grotesquely obvious advantages of small class size and selective admission, characteristics for which the rich have always been willing to pay, no matter the “research” findings of educational experts that these things don’t really matter. More important, I think, is a characteristic largely absent from those measurement instruments and surveillance mediums currently used to determine and verify  the professional standing of teachers: autonomy. There was a time not so long ago when autonomy was the defining quality of professional status, and its diminishment a sure sign of status degradation. (The seminal work in this vein was Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, although the idea can be found in the earliest reflections on the de-skilling process at the turn of the Industrial Revolution.) Professionals are free to pursue their craft as their own expertise understands it; that expertise is acquired through, and must be demonstrated by, the exercise of that skill to which they claim title; and that skill (or skill set) must be protected against those who would degrade it by disrupting its internal cohesion or inappropriately evaluating its constituent strands. It was freedom that defined the professional, and its absence that signaled the onset of proletarianization, and its resultant slavery. This license granted the professional could lead to unacceptable outcomes as can any monopoly of power/knowledge, but in a true profession, where reputation mattered, the best and most effective policing of quality could only be done by one’s peers. Open to abuse, no doubt; protective of privilege, no doubt; but this guild model emphasized that valuable knowledge was a source of liberty, and it is no accident that in every democratic revolution, it is the artisans who have first peopled the barricades. Autonomous individuals freely practicing their craft encourage autonomy as an abstract value, and the willingness to defend that value in the face of outside challenge mobilizes sentiments and galvanizes resistance to the arbitrary and unconconsidered.

How far has teaching come from this paradigm of professionalism? How much craft has been degraded and competence compromised by the increasingly proletarianized nature of teacher-training and performance-measurement? And how much less is autonomy demonstrated to those for whom it is not yet an entitlement, but a fervently desired goal – the students we claim to cherish?

It’s nice to see Diane Ravitch confessing her sins in public here. And even nicer that she recognizes that others got there first. When one of the most perceptive and intelligent school reformers recants the bullshit she once professed, there is some hope that the juggernaut she helped launch might be slowed, and its damage mitigated. But I fear that once in motion, the great bureaucratic beast of accountability and measurement will be more easily transformed than terminated: there is simply too much money, and too many reputations, at stake to permit a quick interment and necessary recovery. NCLB may be jettisoned, but the attitudes toward learning, evidence, and research which dragged it into life are still around, and the corporate model they instantiate, under severe stress in more visible venues, grows more rapacious the more desperation it has to feed on.

I have watched this year, for the first time in a long career, how packaged programs and empty demands can gut an academic institution; how bureaucratic obsession and rampant, if unacknowledged, administrative stupidity can replace intellectual challenge with academic pabulum, and stunt the construction of critical responsibility under the weight of “character counts.” Once embarked on, this downward spiral of expectations and delusions is hard to stop, the dumbing-down to which it leads difficult to distinguish, the deadening of enthusiasm impossible to mitigate. And worst of all, those in the middle of the mess cannot see it; or rather, it has become so normalized that, if one does not step away, it looks like something substantive, rather than a dense tissue of lies and delusions. This is a thread to which I intend to return, to examine the specificities from which these grotesque generalizations are drawn. But for now, one small exemplar of the disease.

At the beginning of this year, after the tragedy/farce of the previous one, I asked both the middle- and upper school principals if my students were telling me the truth when they claimed to have been taught MLA format, given that their work showed absolutely no sign of it. “Äbsolutely,” said the one;  ”We teach that,” said the other. “Wonderful,”  said I. “Why then can’t they organize a bibliography alphabetically?” “Oh,”said they in unison, “we don’t teach that?”