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Keith,
Of course, I don't "owe" you, or anyone else,
respect. It is a gift I freely give to others who demonstrate personal
integrity, regardless of whether I personally agree with them, or not - and
this is a list where that gift can be generously given. I have been known
to be deferential, without being respectful. Working class people are
usually pretty good at hiding their class anger, with it usually taking various
forms of self-destructiveness when it is a problem. Most of the time it is
just passive silence, hiding the kind of passionate,
uncredentialled self-learning (not recognized in the economy) which Thomas
talks about in his eloquent post.
Thank you, Thomas, for your honesty.
BB
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2003 1:16
AM
Subject: Re: FULL OF ADMIRATION (was RE:
Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs.
Modern Trade
Hi Bob,
At 15:31 15/12/2003 -0500, you
wrote:
<<<<
No personal
disrespect is intended towards either you, Keith, or Harry, and I will state
unequivocally my respect for you both. If I have written anything that
has offended you, I offer my most deepfelt apologies for doing
so.
>>>>>
Good gracious! No
possible offence taken. You don't owe us any respect -- at least not me.
Anybody who can write as you have done in your posting (which is in full
below) deserves respect in turn.
Yes, you are quite right. You didn't
say so, but I was being over-dramatic. The fact that Harry and I are working
class has nothing to do with it. It was a non sequitur argument on my
part!
But the fact remains that, in England at least, the state school
system is failing badly. As you write
here:
<<<<
My view is that
the working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal
reforms, despite the rhetoric of equity. Failure rates and drop out
rates are increasing. The savage inequalities that have injured the
working class and minorities still exist.
>>>>
There are many contributing factors to all
this. It is not just the state education system. The wider social and cultural
context is at fault, too. I feel, however, that the civil service must take
most of the blame (at least in England) because they (that is, the Department
of Education) have allowed the standard of state school teachers to decline so
badly and so steadily over the years. Half of newly-'qualified' teachers
cannot do simple mathematics. Many of them are actually afraid of the subject.
Many (if not most) of those teachers in secondary schools who are trying teach
physics (to A-level -- pre-university level) have never learned the subject
themselves! Many newly-qualified teachers cannot write a decent sentence. Our
FW colleague, Christoph Creuss, with whom I disagree very greatly on several
economics issues, who has learned English as a Swiss (in a Swiss state school
as he reminds us!), can write English better than most English people -- more
than 80% of them, I suggest, and equal to most of the remainder. Not only are
his sentences constructed properly but each follows the other in a logical
straightforward way that doesn't cause me to re-read each paragraph twice or
thrice over to try and understand just what the writer is driving at.
I
saw a fascinating and very moving Channel 4 programme last night on feral
children which is very apposite to what we are discussing and I am hoping to
write a little about this in a separate posting. It very much has to do
with brain development in the earliest months and years of the child (for
which the teachers and the education authorities are not directly to blame) --
and this is the direction from which I approach educational matters.
I
was bitten by the Skinnerian bug when I was a young man. In fact, I became so
interested in Skinner's researches that I left chemistry for a couple of years
and became the first professional writer of learning programmes in England.
But that experience -- and the subsequent failure of programmed learning
(except for the very highly motivated) -- taught me that one should not be
carried away by ideologies, especially in education, and this has caused me to
become very suspicious of the succession of theories that we have seen in the
educationalists' world in the last 30 years. It has only been the advent of
basic science in the subject in only the last 10 years or so -- mainly from
the various neurosciences -- which is now bringing some order and sense to the
proceedings.
The neurosciences are also, at last, beginning to marry
the respective contributions of environment and genetics in the overall scheme
of things. So I will end here with the uncomfortable thought that the 80-odd
brain genes that we possess and which the chimp doesn't, and the various
(almost infinite) semi-random combinations they make at the point of
fertilisation also contribute to the matter. (This is not to mention the 1,000
plus genes that we share with chimps and which are also involved in brain
development in the foetus.) And, in an age where technology and an
understanding of science is becoming basic to our civilisation, this genetic
matter, too, is important and may be contributing to
divisiveness.
Keith
At 15:31 15/12/2003 -0500, you
wrote:
Hi Keith
and Harry,
With the utmost respect for the both of you, I submit the
following. I consider my working class roots to be as impeccable as
yours. Like you, I share a strong work ethic, an innate survival
instinct, and a passion for a society better than the one into which I was
born.
My
father came to Canada as child labour, as a Barnardo home boy, from
England. Until he was 16 he was effectively free farm labour,
separated from his biological family in Cambridgeshire, and marginalized by
the Canadian family whom he served. He suffered emotional and physical
abuse, was not allowed to eat with them, and was denied an education beyond
the second grade. Shame characterized his life as he wandered the back
streets, away from a public gaze, and tended the gardens of the rich, in my
hometown. My mother was crippled by polio, from the time she was 4
years old. She had many side illnesses in pre-Medicare Canada. I
was raised in poverty and knew about hunger and class marginalization as a
child and bear that psychological imprint as an adult.
The social capital of
the Welfare State, after World War 11, and the ideology of equal
opportunity, allowed me to get an education. It was the luck of
context, however, not any special merit on my part. I suspect it is
similar with the two of you, respectively. In a family of five, I am
the only one who finished high school and went on to university
education. There are many, many bright working class youth as capable
as I am, and as you are. However, current educational reforms are
limiting the kinds of opportunities we were able to partake of.
I became a
teacher and went many, many rounds, with a class stratified school system,
on behalf of my working class students. As an educational researcher,
my only interest has been in what happens to working class children in
essentially middle class schools. My current project, "Whose
Standards?: Performance Standards, Globalization, and the Restructuring of
School Knowledge" is part of my attempt to understand what is happening to
working class kids under the current school reforms in relation to the
paradigm shift in the way kid's achievment and teacher accountability is
benchmarked using high stakes testing. The project has been supported
by SSHRC funding and several scholarships. I have had lots of contact
with powerful and wealthy people. I have been a political activist and
president of the riding association of a former Ontario Finance
Minister. But who cares? I don't think it has anything to do
with what I contribute to this list. Rightly, or wrongly, I see this
list as a place for me to learn from some very smart people, exchange views,
and get information, a lot of which I keep for use in my work.
My view is that the
working class has largely been written off in the current neoliberal
reforms, despite the rhetoric of equity. Failure rates and drop out
rates are increasing. The savage inequalities that have injured the
working class and minorities still exist.
I can assure you that to
imply that there is a correlation between being working class and supporting
private education is absolutely spurious. I worked for several years
on large scale surveys of public attitudes towards education in Ontario and
we found no evidence that working class respondents, in significant numbers,
were supportive of this kind of change. In fact, most working class
activists see private education as a threat to working class
opportunity.
Studies of working class resistance indicate that some working class
youth internalize the meritocratic myths of middle class schooling and
thrive within them. Paul Willis's classic study of working class
resistance called such kids "ear'oles." But many resist the class
cultural agenda, that often includes the belittlement of working class work
and working class identities and engage in cultural resistance. You
and Harry may well be examples of the former, but I am an example of the
latter. High school was a cultural dead space, for me. You
support private education. I differ and support public
education. Vouchers and charter schools do not help working class
kids.
The
research is pretty clear that the best predictor of success, in schooling,
is the neighborhood you live in. Taking only the matter of reading
scores, the higher your parent's socio-economic status, the higher your
reading level. High stakes testing is producing similar
correlations.
No personal disrespect is intended towards either you, Keith, or
Harry, and I will state unequivocally my respect for you both. If I
have written anything that has offended you, I offer my most deepfelt
apologies for doing so.
Respectfully submitted,
Bob
Keith wrote:
It is strange, is it not, that you and I, both working
class, and who know what it's all about at every level of society from top
to bottom, should be the ones (the only ones on this list as far as I can
make out) who are calling for private schools. IT IS BECAUSE THE STATE
SYSTEM OF EDUCATION, DUMBING DOWN FOR THE PAST CENTURY AT EVERY OPPORTUNITY,
IS THE GREATEST INJUSTICE THAT HAS BEING DONE TO MOST ORDINARY WORKING
PEOPLE'S CHILDREN BECAUSE BASIC SKILLS ARE NO LONGER TAUGHT. They are now
being left defenceless just at the time when we should be vastly upgrading
our skills.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,
<www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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