Tangent: intellectual detritus

1) Citizenship rhetoric & education (continued): As previously discussed, schools are about creating the next batch of citizens; thinking about that in light of other previous thoughts about immigration, made me start to play the analogy out (something I do lots of; hence my interest in "reframings" and other ways to further inform the debate through tilting it on its side)...does this then make home schooling the equivalent reaction of the xenophobe? (We can't control the larger world, and it's all going to ruin, so we have to "seal the borders" and only deal with taking care of our own.) Is home schooling essentially the paleo-con position? If that's true, is public schooling essentially a neo-con construction? I suppose it could be, or it could be a liberal construction (if education is conceived as creating a new collaborative culture rather than imperially imposing culture upon the next generation--a la the neocons).

2) The rhetoric of NAR takes on media consolidation: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre [media environment] that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in [media diversity] made in the wake of the [the advent of public broadcasting in the US]. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral [intellectual] disarmament." Does saying it that way make my thesis more compelling?

3) Motivation & GEC: In my day job as a marketer, I got a copy of Motivation Strategies, a trade publication about using promotional items to motivate sales teams, etc. I found this interesting:

Including luxury brands in an incentive program can be a great way to dress it up and give participants something to stretch for--believing that if they just work a little harder they might have a shot at earning that high-quality, luxury item. But incentive end-users should also make sure the luxury item fits the demographics and profile of participants.
But don't let your luxury item become the be-all and end-all of your program, says Dana Slockbower, Director of Marketing for Rymax. 'You need to have quality branded products at price points for everyone,' she says. 'Some people will be driven by that aspirational luxury item they can work towards, but others need to feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return.'
It becomes demotivating, in fact, 'to offer rewards that cannot be reached,' says Norma Jean Knollenberg of Top Brands, 'regardless of the brand or the perceived luxury value of the brand.' ("Living in the Lap of Luxury (Brands)", Motivation Strategies, Vol. 11, Issue 4, Fall 2007. p. 22)

So why is this interesting? Not because it's particularly insightful--if one remembers the chapter from high school psychology class, one can probably resurrect that page about the rats in the cage with the electrified floor and learned helplessness. What's interesting is that it's coming from what can only be called "the heart of the GEC beast"--capitalism at its finest, where competition is celebrated, and good citizenship is a PR strategy, not a responsibility (previous issues have talked about how companies perceived as "green" are rising in popularity without any need to address the issue of being green vs. being perceived as green).
Yet even here, there's a recognition that "offering rewards that cannot be reached" can be demotivating. Yet the quintessence of the GEC paradigm is the understanding that education serves the purpose of increasing one's success in the marketplace. It has no "backup plan", no "quality branded products at price points for everyone" for someone who looks around h/erself and doesn't see people succeeding in the marketplace; it has nothing to say to someone who recognizes that h/er job opportunities are limited by factors that have little to do with education. It has only that dream to sell; anyone who doesn't believe is accused of not dreaming hard enough. There is no recognition (in the education policies proposed in the GEC paradigm) that there needs to be a reason to attend school that helps students "feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return."

And nevermind the idea of being first in the world in all subjects and all elements of the global economy is to offer "rewards that cannot be reached", no matter how "luxury" such an idea might seem. From reading articles like this, it seems apparent that even the business community (which educationists are supposed to be falling over themselves to emulate) recognizes that not everyone is the top salesperson; motivation strategies exist to help improve the overall efforts and effects of the sales staff, but not everyone can (or wants to) "achieve at world-class levels". Yet, to point out such a fact in education policy is complete heresy--seen as proof that one recognizes others as categorically inferior, rather than proof that one recognizes the belief that "everyone wants a Rolex" is a categorically inferior belief.

Topic: current state of thinking (summary)

While this is still not a "research question" (or "phenomenon of inquiry" if you, like me, are less fond of the "lab report" structure inherent in most dissertation thinking and want a less scientistic euphemism, though I still can't embrace the term; but that's a Meta: post for another time), my thinking about "what I want to learn" is sitting in this formulation in my word processor currently: How do we construct a more powerful public narrative for the idea of engaged citizenship as the purpose for public schooling?

This is really coming out of opposition toward the dominant public narrative about the purpose of public schooling, that schools exist to train workers for the new economy so that America can maintain its dominance. I call this the Global Economic Competitiveness frame (GEC), and see it coming largely out of A Nation at Risk for a variety of rhetorical and historical reasons. (About which many posts will definitely follow.)

I’m deeply influenced in this line of thinking by David Labaree’s Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals in American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 39-81. [and by virtue of going to a “hippie school” for undergrad]. So I’m interested—on a larger political, ethical level—in creating the conditions where politicians don’t mention “developing good citizens” as the poor stepchild in their list of reasons why we need to do something about education, but rather place it at the center of their list of reasons (and, of course, alter their policy prescriptions accordingly). On a research level, I’m interested from the standpoint of how did GEC so effectively eclipse (for example) the competing equity frame that gave us Head Start and other programs looking to use education as a tool to ameliorate social ills.

Among my many concerns about GEC are:

• Rhetorically, that it normalizes a business paradigm where competition becomes an essential part of education (and by extension, American supremacy in that competition—in education and elsewhere—is taken for granted—as an “is” and an “ought”), where measurement is paramount, and money is the ultimate measure
• Practically, that it reduces learning to job training—if it’s just that, why should the public have to pay instead of the employers it’s designed to benefit?
• On a policy level, that there’s no evidence that what we do in education has any relevance to what happens in the economy—the generation that created the personal computer and internet revolution is the same one that was graduating from (or even dropping out of) the educational system that was supposedly so bad that “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” And even as those revolutions gave us the longest sustained period of economic advancement in history, we didn’t hear anyone credit the education system.
• And more, but that’s a start…
  

So I want to call for us to get smarter about how we think and talk about the purposes of public education so that we can be more successful at improving education. One way I see of doing that is overthrowing the GEC and replacing it with something better. But that’s a tall order, so I’m interested in how that happens; I think by being smart about how it happens in the media will help shape how it happens in politics as well. (Tangent post will be created about media vs. politics strategies if needed.)