C.A. Bowers critiques Bill Ayers' book on Social Justice Education

Editor: Both C.A. Bowers and Bill Ayers have written articles for the Journal of Educational Controversy in the past. Among other things, this blog is a forum for authors to continue the conversations started in the journal. Below Chet reviews Bill Ayers book, The Handbook on Social Justice in Education.


Is It Relevant as a Guide for Understanding Social Justice Issues in the Twenty-First Century? A Critique of the Handbook on Social Justice Education

Author: C. A. Bowers

The Handbook on Social Justice in Education, edited by William Ayers, Therese Quinn, and David Stovall was so highly regarded that the reference librarian at the University of Oregon placed it in a special collection out of a concern that it may be lost or damaged if allowed to be taken out of the library. As I read through the many aspects of social justice issues to be addressed by educators, which range widely from historical perspectives to the continuing challenges in the areas of race, gender, disabilities, and globalization, I was struck by how dated the collection of well-intentioned essays had already become. Perhaps the reference librarian was unaware that the Handbook would perpetuate the silences that characterize the last 30 or so years of thinking about how teacher educators should address social justice issues. There are some books that never become dated, such as Eric Havelock’s The Muse Learns to Write (1986), Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation (2002 edition), and Daniel Worster’s Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1997). Other books, including many that address changes occurring in the world’s ecosystems, quickly become dated as their authors either continue to remain silent about the ecological crisis or write about environmental changes and their impacts on cultures that are quickly surpassed by more recent changes.

Books by educational reformers that fail to acknowledge that the ecological crisis is altering the prospects of humanity in fundamental ways cease to be useful guides for how to address the new injustices that are being magnified by recent environmental changes. Their usefulness is not only limited, but becomes part of the mis-education that students encounter in other university courses that fail to address the cultural roots of the ecological crisis. But the Handbook suggests another failure. Namely, it serves as evidence of the failure of educational theorists to break out of their mutual quoting circles that share the same silences. Unfortunately, many graduate students are likely to be encouraged to consider the Handbook as a primary scholarly resource that should guide their thinking, which would again lead to reproducing the silences and misconceptions their professors learned to take-for-granted in their own years of graduate study. These may seem like overly harsh criticisms of the editors and the contributors of what must have been initially viewed as an important contribution to overcoming social injustices in society. As scientists are warning that we may have as little as a couple of decades before global warming can no longer be slowed, and as we are already witnessing with the collapse of local ecosystems the suffering and deaths of millions of people, it’s time that educational theorists be held accountable for not rethinking the orthodoxies that now make their prescriptions for addressing social justice issues so dated.

My criticisms are not directed at such sensible recommendations as hiring faculty that are representative of a multicultural society, or at the need to incorporate into the curriculum awareness of the range of social injustices—ranging from race, gender, poverty, etc., or for the need for students to learn about the systemic roots of these forms of injustice. Rather, my criticisms fall into three different categories.

First, This 774 page tome has only one reference to “ecological analysis”, and it focuses on patterns of human interaction--and not on the cultural and natural system ecologies. And the phrase “ecological crisis” appears in one sentence along with the usual list of unresolved social problems. Given that even Wal-Mart as well as other major contributors to a hyper- consumer, toxic producing lifestyle are attempting to lighten their ecological footprint, and the plethora of books addressing both the nature of the ecological crisis and ways that local communities are working to recover their traditions of mutual support and self-reliance, the reader might expect that social justice issues might be understood in a more current way. There is now a huge literature on the impact of water shortages being experienced as a result of climate change, and it would seem that this would be a critical social justice issue. In the United States alone, twenty percent of the population does not have access to clean water. World-wide, there are more people dying from the lack of potable water than are being killed in current wars. The range of toxins that are affecting the development of children, as well as the range of illnesses experienced throughout society from the thousands of synthetic chemicals used in the manufacturing process, have been the focus of attention since Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (now in its 27th edition), and the first Earth Day held in 1970. Climate change is now recognized as responsible for the melting of ice fields that are the source of water for hundreds of millions of people, as well as the droughts that are forcing people to become environmental refugees. The regions of the United States experiencing serious droughts in the last few years are contributing to unemployment, changes in diets, and a further decline into poverty. The evidence has been available in responsible media that social injustices will expand exponentially if one considers the implications of the changes occurring in just one area of ecological degradation. Scientists, for example, are documenting that the chemistry of the world’s oceans is becoming more acidic and is having an adverse impact on the bottom of the ocean food chain upon which the fish stocks humans rely upon depend. This, combined with over-fishing, has already led to the collapse of major fisheries in different regions of the world. If the shortage of fresh water does not lead to international conflicts, the lack of ocean sources of protein will.
One has to ask why these well-publicized changes have escaped the attention of the contributors to the Handbook. If they had given any thought to the social justice issues that have been the focus of a wide range of national and international organizations, one might have expected a radical reconceptualization of the social justice issues that can be traced directly to the globalization of the western model of development. These are issues related to actual homelessness, disease, death, hunger, and the refugee status of millions that involves the loss of the ability to achieve one’s most basic potential as a human being. How does one explain the silence on the part of the contributors to the Handbook? One possible explanation can be found in the long list of books cited at the end of each chapter. Most of the citations refer to articles and books written by colleagues in the field who share a similar educational background. There are few books cited written by environmentalists, by scientists concerned with how our bodies and environments are being poisoned by our industrial/consumer oriented lifestyle, and by community activists.

Second: While the Handbook includes recommendations for achieving social justice in nine areas, the failure to address how the ecological crisis, as well as the impact of economic globalization, are expanding the list of social injustices experienced by the majority of the world’s population, leads to an excessive amount of repetition. References to the contributions and failures of past approaches to multicultural education, to the need to foster critical thinking and a transformative lifestyle, to anti-biases in curriculum materials and pedagogy, and to the need to create positive learning environments, are important. But the repetitiveness of these recommendations does not help the reader obtain an understanding of the curricular changes that can help alleviate the scale of poverty, and will provide the conceptual basis for exercising communicative competency in resisting the further commodification and monetizing of the local cultural and environmental commons that is a major contributor to poverty. Again, the contributors rely upon the formulaic prescriptions of the late twentieth century, which include more critical thinking, more concern about the plight of social groups and individuals who face a myriad forms of injustice. But the prescriptions do not translate into recommendations for how individual and community gardens can be promoted, how traditional technologies for preserving food can be intergenerationally passed along, how volunteerism and mentoring in a wide range of non monetized and mutually supportive activities can be promoted, and how to enable students to recognize the differences between their experiences in the cultural commons and market-oriented sub-cultures that will lead to the development of the communicative competence necessary for resisting the further enclosure of what remains of their non-monetized lives.
With the spread of economic globalization, colonization to a western individualistic/consumer oriented lifestyle, and the unrelenting quest for new technologies and markets, one of the dominant features of the future will be scarcity—in access to protein, to potable water and water for agriculture, to sources of a dignified and community supporting livelihood, and to the intergenerational knowledge that has enabled many cultures to achieve a degree of self-reliance without destroying the bioregions they were dependent upon. The double bind the world is now facing is that the emphasis on material progress is leading to more forms of scarcity—including the loss of intergenerational knowledge and skills that enable people to live less consumer dependent lives.

Several contributors focus on the systemic causes of social injustices, and suggest that students should be engaged in a discussion of how to bring about needed changes. However, what they miss is that students should also be encouraged to engage in auto-ethnographies of their local communities in order to identify the forms of intergenerational knowledge and skill that need to be renewed. Indeed, the possibility that critical inquiry should also lead to an awareness of what should be conserved goes unrecognized by the contributors to the Handbook. Traditions such as the gains in civil liberties, as well as recent achievements by the labor, civil rights, feminist, and now environmental movements—all essential to addressing unresolved social justice issues—need to be part of the curriculum. Passing this knowledge on to the next generation is part of the process of conserving important social justice gains. Social justice education, contrary to the impression left by some of the contributors, should not represent all traditions as being the source of oppressive. The legacy of previous social justice struggles should be part of the collective memory, as it provides evidence of the importance of collective action focused on the common good—a value that is increasingly being marginalized in our consumer and technologically addicted culture.

Third: Since both the students who are victims of social injustice, as well as those who will dedicate their lives to improving the prospects of others, will encounter mostly a middle class, consumer-oriented curriculum that may include shallow introductions to the cultures of minority groups, the following questions arise: Do the contributors to the Handbook provide guidance for recognizing how to reframe the analogs that are encoded in the vocabulary that students encounter in most areas of the curriculum? Will readers of the Handbook be able to recognize how the vocabulary in the curriculum serves as a form of linguistic colonization of the present by past thinkers who were unaware of environmental limits? Granted, social justice-oriented educators are more likely to be aware of the linguistic colonization that goes on in multicultural classrooms. But they are unlikely to be aware of the history of the analogs that frame the meaning of words in the curriculum they take-for-granted, such as “individualism”, “progress”, “traditions”, “ecology”, and so forth. Introducing students to the fact that words have a history would seem especially critical in a social justice-oriented curriculum—and there was no mention of this in the Handbook.

Nor is there any discussion of how to introduce students to the many ways in which the idea of individual intelligence is problematic—for ecological, cultural, and moral reasons. It would seem that if the contributors spent less time reading the writings of their professors and colleagues who share the same silences and historically rooted misconceptions, they might be able to focus on how to introduce their students to the many cultural alternatives that serve as evidence that intelligence is not an attribute of the autonomous individual. That is, they might understand how to introduce students to the limited ways they already exercise what can be called ecological intelligence—and the problems that arise in the students’ interpersonal relationships when they assume that the preconceived prejudices, ideas, and judgments they act upon are based on their own perceptions of reality. That is, when they ignore the differences which make a difference in their ongoing relationships with other students, parents, others in society—and in their relations with the other participants in the local and global ecological systems they are part of, their sense of being an autonomous individual (which was promoted in different ways both by Rene Descartes and by many current educational reformers) cannot help but promote further social injustice. There are many non-western examples of how the exercise of ecological intelligence fosters mutually supportive community relationships as well as how to live in more ecologically sustainable ways, but the question to be asked of social justice educators is: How do we begin to help students make the transition to exercising in a more conscious way their ecological intelligence? Somewhere in the 774 pages of the Handbook this question should have been raised, particularly since one of the major contributors to the many forms of social injustice that exist in American society is the lack of awareness of how the hyper-subjective sense of individualism and entitlement marginalizes an awareness of how one’s actions adversely impact others, including cultural groups.

Hopefully, the Handbook will be viewed by educational historians as a well-intentioned effort of educational reformers who are out of touch with the dominant realities of their times. And hopefully, these historians will possess the conceptual ability to explain the linguistic reasons that one generation that has been colonized by many previous generations succeeds in colonizing the next generations. This hope should not be interpreted as giving support to Paulo Freire's universal recommendation that each generation should rename the reality of the previous generation. The process of linguistic colonization is far more complex than he understood or his followers understand today. But this is another story—and another potential source of misunderstanding.
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Essays on Ecologically Sustainable Educational Reforms

One of our authors in our current issue on "The Hidden Dimensions of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty and Education" has announced his new online book that is available for downloading as part of the "cultural commons." You can find the book, Essays on Ecologically Sustainable Educational Reforms by C.A. Bowers, by going to www.cabowers.net/ Also check out Chet Bower's article in our journal entitled, "Rethinking Social Justice Issues Within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework."

Below is the table of contents for the book:

Essays on Ecologically Sustainable Educational Reforms

By C.A. Bowers

Chapter 1 Making the Transition from Individual to Ecological Intelligence: The Challenge Facing Curriculum Theorists

Chapter 2 The Limitations of the Daniel Goleman/Wal-Mart View of Ecological Intelligence

Chapter 3 The Hidden Roots of Cultural Colonization in Teaching English as a Second Language

Chapter 4 Reflections on Teaching the Course “Curriculum Reform in an Era of Global Warming”

Chapter 5 University Reforms that Contribute to the Revitalization of the Cultural Commons

Chapter 6 The Environmental Ethic in Three Theories of Evolution

Chapter 7 Educating for a Sustainable Future: Mediating Between the Commons and Economic Globalization

Chapter 8 The Imperialistic Agenda of Moacir Gadotti’s Eco-Pedagogy

UPDATE: For readers who have had difficulty finding the book, here is a direct link:

http://www.cabowers.net/pdf/Book-Essays-Eco.pdf

Contesting Progressivism: Discretion as Oppression

[This is a follow-up to this earlier forum post. I know many blog members, especially, are caught up with AERA prep, and it’s pretty long (and, dense, yes, okay) anyway. But what the heck.]

A core value of progressive visions of democracy is flexibility in response to the shifting realities of life in a complex society. True democracy, progressives believed, required capacities for constant and fluid adjustment to the unpredictable contingencies of life in modern society. Dewey and others argued, for example, that the U.S. Constitution should be revisited over time and freely, democratically adapted to new conditions that would emerge over time. The slowness of cultural change in response to the much faster shifts of a quickly industrializing society was a key problem for progressives.

In a truly democratic society, the progressives imagined, collections of unique individuals would be engaged in a constant collaborative effort to create a better society in response to the shifting sands of social change.

From the perspective of progressivism, then, permanence of any kind—especially social structures like rules and cultural practices—was a barrier to the emergence of a truly democratic society. In fact, combating this “lag” was a core motivation for Dewey’s vision of democratic education.

When everyone in democratic associations like the ones they imagined is equal, it may be reasonable to see this as a vision of real freedom for all. However, in reality no social contexts are ever totally equal and, more problematically, most contexts where people meet each other across cultural and economic gulfs are quite unequal.

In unequal contexts, this vision of flexibility becomes something different. It becomes what middle-class professionals have long fought for: discretion for an elite with the individual and collective right (through their associations) to make relatively independent decisions that effect the lives of others with less power. To a large extent, in fact, one can equate the need for “professions” in the first place with this need for “professional judgment” in situations that cannot be predefined ahead of time. To the extent that bureaucrats embedded within larger organizations maintain some level of discretion, they can (and would generally like to) see themselves as “professionals” as well.

It is equally helpful to see the reduction of the “discretion” of professionals as one of the core aims of working-class and impoverished social movements. For example, unions have long fought to establish the “work rules” that so often bedevil middle-class professionals and bureaucrats who see them as unreasonable constraints. In their contracts, unions frequently seek to reduce the discretion of management, creating restrictions on what workers can and cannot be told to do, and these restrictions usually restrict workers’ own decision-making at the same time.

Flexibility, those on the bottom have long known, is rarely a gift. Instead, it is often a burden, a tool for oppression wielded by those who have more power. In fact, what professionals generally want in an unequal world are rules that restrict the power of those below them but that leave them with maximum discretion to respond “intelligently” to contingency. What workers have frequently sought are rules that reduce this discretion, sometimes by transferring authority for decisions to them, but more frequently by writing decisions “into stone” at least until the next contract.

(Teachers, caught, as they are, uncomfortably between the positions of “workers” and “professionals”, often struggle to negotiate this in their own union contracts.)

If there are no set rules then the conditions of labor and life end up in the hands of those with the power to decide at any point what should happen. From this perspective, such rules are real accomplishments to be defended at high cost, even when they may seem to have become outdated. Throwing rules open for deliberation raises the possibility that these accomplishments may be lost. In this context, an imperfect constitution, an imperfect affirmative action system, an imperfect labor contract all can seem much safer than unpredictable deliberative contexts in which control can easily be lost and in which new rules may unpredictably alter the balance of power that had cost so much to achieve. (Critical race theorists have made this point as well).

A good example of the ways social movements of the less powerful can often be interpreted at least partly as struggles against professional “discretion,” can be found in the early struggles over welfare laws in America.

In the early days of public “welfare,” a great deal of discretionary power was put into the hands of middle-class social workers. And these social workers would often make culturally and racially discriminatory assumptions about the lives of their “clients,” using their discretion to try to mandate changes in the direction of more “standard” middle class values. These judgments were often perceived by clients as insulting and demeaning, but those unwilling to conform might quickly find their families out on the street without support.

The welfare rights movement successfully fought to change this system. They demanded strict rules that would define ahead of time who was and was not eligible for benefits, removing nearly all decision-making power from those who had previously judged them from on high.

Of course, these strict rules created their own set of challenges, which, in part, led to the dismantling of the system and to a range of pernicious consequences (although these were frequently exaggerated and misdescribed by conservatives). Despite these limitations, the welfare rules achieved by welfare rights activists did represent a great advance over the conditions recipients had experienced previously. To some extent, in fact, these limitations were integral to the benefits the new system brought.

(New visions of flexible work-groups that harvest the creativity of low-level workers in the same manner that these structures harvest the skills of professionals have been attempted in a range of different businesses. Most of the evidence indicates, however, that the modernist hierarchical model remains the norm even when lip-service is given to this model.)

The only way one could imagine flexibility could becoming beneficial to the relatively powerless would be if one could guarantee the existence of durable institutional structures that could constantly represent their interests. But while power is a collective achievement for those on the bottom, it is located more in individuals at higher levels. It is difficult to see how these collectives with limited “attention” could keep track of the myriad decisions being made by diffuse numbers of bureaucrats and professionals at all levels of any bureaucracy. The only way to level the playing field, it seems, is the creation of rules that limit the amount of “attention” necessary to enforce equality.

(To some extent, perhaps it is helpful to see these collectives—community organizing groups, for example—as “individuals” in the sense that Dewey meant this. In this analogy, the set “rules” equate somewhat to the established “habits” of individual persons necessary to free their limited attention of their leaders for aspects of their life where conscious attention and adjustment is most necessary. You want to fight for rules, and then monitor their implementation instead of fighting for a dialogic process that you constantly have to spend enormous energy supporting (and fighting within)).

Ironically as a result of the progressives’ inability to solve the problem of inequality, then, their cherished vision of a fluid, democratic “planning society” seems to contain within it, almost inevitably, the seeds of an oppressive “expert determined” society. Truly collaborative “democracy” slips too easily away into middle-class “discrection.” (This is especially true, as I noted earlier, when progressives took it upon themselves to delimit who does and does not count as adequately prepared for equal participation in citizenship.)

Visions of democratic classrooms where children learn to have the power to coordinate themselves and to respond collaboratively to change and complexity thus misdescribe the true contours of our society. In fact, even in the most ideal examples, outside classrooms where there are no teachers to artificially equalize power, such an attitude inevitably ends up empowering some while disempowering others.

(It is, of course, true that some discretion is required for any organization to function. Thus, there is a constant tension in many bureaucratic organizations between the fight for discretion at the top and middle, and against discretion at the bottom. And to further complicate this issue, it is also true that reality is always too complex to operate on simple rules. This is why a key labor strategy has always been “work to rule,” where the rules are actually followed to the letter and everything completely shuts down. So there is always an “underlife” of creativity functioning beneath the rules—in a sense productively “contesting” them—so that any organization can function at all. In a sense, the creativity that new models of collaborative work-groups were supposed to generate has always been there, except that it has usually manifested as an odd kind of “resistance” that is actually the only thing that allows the machine to run in the first place. In the extreme model of a Taylorist scientific management bureaucracy, the stupid “hands” that are not supposed to think and are not paid to think are actually creatively and intelligently adjusting themselves and their environment in “secret.” And there is, in fact, some evidence that working-class students learn skills for this kind of underlife creativity and system-maintaining rule breaking as a part of the “working-class” rote education most of them receive. I’ve explored some of this here.)

Contesting Progressivism: Discretion as Oppression

[This is a follow-up to this earlier forum post. I know many blog members, especially, are caught up with AERA prep, and it’s pretty long (and, dense, yes, okay) anyway. But what the heck.]

A core value of progressive visions of democracy is flexibility in response to the shifting realities of life in a complex society. True democracy, progressives believed, required capacities for constant and fluid adjustment to the unpredictable contingencies of life in modern society. Dewey and others argued, for example, that the U.S. Constitution should be revisited over time and freely, democratically adapted to new conditions that would emerge over time. The slowness of cultural change in response to the much faster shifts of a quickly industrializing society was a key problem for progressives.

In a truly democratic society, the progressives imagined, collections of unique individuals would be engaged in a constant collaborative effort to create a better society in response to the shifting sands of social change.

From the perspective of progressivism, then, permanence of any kind—especially social structures like rules and cultural practices—was a barrier to the emergence of a truly democratic society. In fact, combating this “lag” was a core motivation for Dewey’s vision of democratic education.

When everyone in democratic associations like the ones they imagined is equal, it may be reasonable to see this as a vision of real freedom for all. However, in reality no social contexts are ever totally equal and, more problematically, most contexts where people meet each other across cultural and economic gulfs are quite unequal.

In unequal contexts, this vision of flexibility becomes something different. It becomes what middle-class professionals have long fought for: discretion for an elite with the individual and collective right (through their associations) to make relatively independent decisions that effect the lives of others with less power. To a large extent, in fact, one can equate the need for “professions” in the first place with this need for “professional judgment” in situations that cannot be predefined ahead of time. To the extent that bureaucrats embedded within larger organizations maintain some level of discretion, they can (and would generally like to) see themselves as “professionals” as well.

It is equally helpful to see the reduction of the “discretion” of professionals as one of the core aims of working-class and impoverished social movements. For example, unions have long fought to establish the “work rules” that so often bedevil middle-class professionals and bureaucrats who see them as unreasonable constraints. In their contracts, unions frequently seek to reduce the discretion of management, creating restrictions on what workers can and cannot be told to do, and these restrictions usually restrict workers’ own decision-making at the same time.

Flexibility, those on the bottom have long known, is rarely a gift. Instead, it is often a burden, a tool for oppression wielded by those who have more power. In fact, what professionals generally want in an unequal world are rules that restrict the power of those below them but that leave them with maximum discretion to respond “intelligently” to contingency. What workers have frequently sought are rules that reduce this discretion, sometimes by transferring authority for decisions to them, but more frequently by writing decisions “into stone” at least until the next contract.

(Teachers, caught, as they are, uncomfortably between the positions of “workers” and “professionals”, often struggle to negotiate this in their own union contracts.)

If there are no set rules then the conditions of labor and life end up in the hands of those with the power to decide at any point what should happen. From this perspective, such rules are real accomplishments to be defended at high cost, even when they may seem to have become outdated. Throwing rules open for deliberation raises the possibility that these accomplishments may be lost. In this context, an imperfect constitution, an imperfect affirmative action system, an imperfect labor contract all can seem much safer than unpredictable deliberative contexts in which control can easily be lost and in which new rules may unpredictably alter the balance of power that had cost so much to achieve. (Critical race theorists have made this point as well).

A good example of the ways social movements of the less powerful can often be interpreted at least partly as struggles against professional “discretion,” can be found in the early struggles over welfare laws in America.

In the early days of public “welfare,” a great deal of discretionary power was put into the hands of middle-class social workers. And these social workers would often make culturally and racially discriminatory assumptions about the lives of their “clients,” using their discretion to try to mandate changes in the direction of more “standard” middle class values. These judgments were often perceived by clients as insulting and demeaning, but those unwilling to conform might quickly find their families out on the street without support.

The welfare rights movement successfully fought to change this system. They demanded strict rules that would define ahead of time who was and was not eligible for benefits, removing nearly all decision-making power from those who had previously judged them from on high.

Of course, these strict rules created their own set of challenges, which, in part, led to the dismantling of the system and to a range of pernicious consequences (although these were frequently exaggerated and misdescribed by conservatives). Despite these limitations, the welfare rules achieved by welfare rights activists did represent a great advance over the conditions recipients had experienced previously. To some extent, in fact, these limitations were integral to the benefits the new system brought.

(New visions of flexible work-groups that harvest the creativity of low-level workers in the same manner that these structures harvest the skills of professionals have been attempted in a range of different businesses. Most of the evidence indicates, however, that the modernist hierarchical model remains the norm even when lip-service is given to this model.)

The only way one could imagine flexibility could becoming beneficial to the relatively powerless would be if one could guarantee the existence of durable institutional structures that could constantly represent their interests. But while power is a collective achievement for those on the bottom, it is located more in individuals at higher levels. It is difficult to see how these collectives with limited “attention” could keep track of the myriad decisions being made by diffuse numbers of bureaucrats and professionals at all levels of any bureaucracy. The only way to level the playing field, it seems, is the creation of rules that limit the amount of “attention” necessary to enforce equality.

(To some extent, perhaps it is helpful to see these collectives—community organizing groups, for example—as “individuals” in the sense that Dewey meant this. In this analogy, the set “rules” equate somewhat to the established “habits” of individual persons necessary to free their limited attention of their leaders for aspects of their life where conscious attention and adjustment is most necessary. You want to fight for rules, and then monitor their implementation instead of fighting for a dialogic process that you constantly have to spend enormous energy supporting (and fighting within)).

Ironically as a result of the progressives’ inability to solve the problem of inequality, then, their cherished vision of a fluid, democratic “planning society” seems to contain within it, almost inevitably, the seeds of an oppressive “expert determined” society. Truly collaborative “democracy” slips too easily away into middle-class “discrection.” (This is especially true, as I noted earlier, when progressives took it upon themselves to delimit who does and does not count as adequately prepared for equal participation in citizenship.)

Visions of democratic classrooms where children learn to have the power to coordinate themselves and to respond collaboratively to change and complexity thus misdescribe the true contours of our society. In fact, even in the most ideal examples, outside classrooms where there are no teachers to artificially equalize power, such an attitude inevitably ends up empowering some while disempowering others.

(It is, of course, true that some discretion is required for any organization to function. Thus, there is a constant tension in many bureaucratic organizations between the fight for discretion at the top and middle, and against discretion at the bottom. And to further complicate this issue, it is also true that reality is always too complex to operate on simple rules. This is why a key labor strategy has always been “work to rule,” where the rules are actually followed to the letter and everything completely shuts down. So there is always an “underlife” of creativity functioning beneath the rules—in a sense productively “contesting” them—so that any organization can function at all. In a sense, the creativity that new models of collaborative work-groups were supposed to generate has always been there, except that it has usually manifested as an odd kind of “resistance” that is actually the only thing that allows the machine to run in the first place. In the extreme model of a Taylorist scientific management bureaucracy, the stupid “hands” that are not supposed to think and are not paid to think are actually creatively and intelligently adjusting themselves and their environment in “secret.” And there is, in fact, some evidence that working-class students learn skills for this kind of underlife creativity and system-maintaining rule breaking as a part of the “working-class” rote education most of them receive. I’ve explored some of this here.)

Social Justice Teaching

From Inside Higher Ed:

By Thomas R. Tritton
What does a college president do after leaving the high intensity rigors of the job? One likely calling is the classroom, whence many of us came in the first place. So after a decade as president of Haverford College, I returned to the classroom at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Professor Judy McLaughlin — she one of the world’s experts on college presidents — created the unique position at Harvard of “President-in-Residence”. Each year Judy invites one of the newly departed to join the faculty, participate in a seminar on the broad topic of higher education, and teach a course of one’s own design. The usual courses a former president might teach — Theories of Leadership, Fundraising 101, Navigating Campus Politics — seemed too easy and too obvious. I decided instead to angle a different approach, an idea which morphed into: A710f: Social Justice in the Undergraduate Experience. You’ll find it right there in the Harvard catalogue. . . .

Read the rest, including the reading list and assignments.

Social Justice Teaching

From Inside Higher Ed:

By Thomas R. Tritton
What does a college president do after leaving the high intensity rigors of the job? One likely calling is the classroom, whence many of us came in the first place. So after a decade as president of Haverford College, I returned to the classroom at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Professor Judy McLaughlin — she one of the world’s experts on college presidents — created the unique position at Harvard of “President-in-Residence”. Each year Judy invites one of the newly departed to join the faculty, participate in a seminar on the broad topic of higher education, and teach a course of one’s own design. The usual courses a former president might teach — Theories of Leadership, Fundraising 101, Navigating Campus Politics — seemed too easy and too obvious. I decided instead to angle a different approach, an idea which morphed into: A710f: Social Justice in the Undergraduate Experience. You’ll find it right there in the Harvard catalogue. . . .

Read the rest, including the reading list and assignments.