Is There a Difference
Between Standardization and Language Intensive Education?
By D J
Lancaster
March 10, 1998
(Special note: The
following is the text of an article posted on the ADPRIMA site
discussion section shortly after it began operations in September
1997. I thought the piece by D J Lancaster was thoughtful,
well written and
important. About three years ago, I got an email from her husband
saying the DJ had passed away, but that he wanted me to know that
she thought highly of my site and the work it contained. I never
knew D J in an way except from a few posts on the ADPRIMA discussion
section. However, I am including this post and several others by her
in the section of Thought Provoking Commentary in memory of an early
visitor who had something important to say and did so in a
compelling way).
Bob Kizlik,
ADPRIMA Webmaster, November 25, 2006
Note: It is now March 2014,
and what Ms. Lancaster had to say back in 1998 resonates as soundly now as
it did then.
Alvin Tofler regarded knowledge as
the most democratic source of power, “Which”, he said “makes it a
continuous threat to the powerful, even as they use it to enhance
their own power. It also explains whey every power holder from the
patriarch of a family to the president of a company or the Prime
Minister of a nation - wants to control the quantity, quality and
distribution of knowledge within his or her domain.” Standards based
education provides a limited assembly of facts instilled through
drill and repetition. Standards, better defined as the engineering
of consent, shapes a student’s mental image of the world. As a
consequence, he or she obtains the language patterns and attitudes
that will sustain that image. If the image is slanted in anyway to
favor or endorse the inherent creeds of one group over another,
there is a decided advantage in the distribution and maintenance of
power for that group.
The code of standards employed by the
government since 1918 or there about, proved useful to
industrialization and played largely into the hands of smokestack
elitists. The standards were designed to prepare an industrial
workforce able to adapt to routine assembly line activity. Text
books were engineered to be repetitive and non-controversial. The
standards code sought to shape behavior and identity around a
nationalistic/industrial hub. Methods and standards were
scientifically developed to coincide with a new emerging economic
agenda promoted by government and industry. Such a focus enabled
government and industry through the 50’s to manage its youth into
group identification, values and behaviors quite effectively. But
then, as the uncensored free marketing of information filtered into
homes via the press, publishing, TV., and radio exposing family
members to a broader more meaningful range of experience; the
independent processing of information started gaining momentum.
The question of informational
relevancy grew from Berkley to the Ghettos. Far from the narrow
endocrinal powers of State came a network of information so vast in
scope and application; the autonomous growth of individuals would be
unstoppable. Once individuals move beyond a simplistic,
one-dimensional perception and have tasted a thing called perceptual
freedom, they are able to define for themselves what information
will sustain and cause their prosperity in a global future. James
observed some time ago “that there is very little difference between
men, but what little difference there is, is great.” Whether
education’s policy shapers want to admit it or not, knowledge
selected for the purposes of ‘understanding’ will, in many cases,
inadvertently enhance and sustain that difference. For example, as
women began to expose themselves to more information about women,
they were positioned to update for themselves their value and
position in society. Hand-me-down definitions from male dominated
western ideologies were inappropriate to an every changing world
where women shared more and more of the economic burden. Women were
no longer bound to congregate around pre-existing organizations
which fed into male dominated structures and economies. Now they
were armed with information and numbers enough to organize in behalf
of their own self interest; inaugurating a ‘new age’ for womankind.
Today there are approximately 500 woman’s studies departments in the
country, three decades ago there were less than five (5). Persons
were learning that with the right kind of information and the skill
to use it, they could be instrumental in shaping their own future
world. We are now confronted by a generation educated in
unprecedented scope and powered by a radically different all
pervasive informational presence which has forever changed the very
nature of learning itself. The vast majority of individuals have
been exposed to more information through the sophisticated
integration of vast exposure to experience than the perennial
building block approach to learning could have ever achieved.
We are therefore faced with a new
reality, a reality in which the function of education can no longer
be to control knowledge, but rather engineer a means of directing,
channeling, and making usable to the individual a mass of knowledge
he/or she is unable to escape. For this we need a language intensive
educational experience. If we are to produce informational equality
we must ascertain the difference between standardization and
knowledge relevancy. A set of facts that is power yielding to one
group of people, may be power draining to another. The kind of
knowledge that yields power especially to underclass populations is
to know what kind of knowledge works against them. As Tofler puts
it, “Virtually every ‘fact’ used in business, political life, and
everyday human relations is derived from other ‘facts’ or
assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the
pre-existing power structure. Every ‘fact’ thus has a power-history
and what might be called a power future - an impact, large or small,
on the future distribution of power.” The fact that whole classes
and groups of people view themselves as distinct from main stream
economies suggests that the information they are receiving from
their standards based education is not fortifying enough to
accomplish the economic integration they so desperately seek.
Standards based education
worked well for first and second generation students. For the most
part those entering the new schools came from poorly informed
families some of which spoke little or no English. The bulk of
industrial work available was de-skilled or dumbed down, and broken
into the simplest operations. But by the 50’s a dramatic change
occurred. The shift from an industrial economic base toward the
information based economy dawned. For the first time, service and
white collar workers out numbered blue collar workers in the United
States. This should have been a signal to alter the learning base
and it’s system of delivery. Instead education’s policy shapers,
whose powers of observation fell short of the times, clung
unwittingly to their own early indoctrination and continued to
promote assembly line education (Read Newton’s
Mental Model).
Those who suffered most from
standards based education after the 50’s were the economically
isolated rural and urban poor who’s ability to access new
information was impeded by a lack of financial reserves and a rather
week language base. Middle class white collar and upper middle class
families who had already entered the informational age assumed a
great advantage. Their children were exposed on a daily basis to
white collar dialogues which speculated on the advances that would
occur in the work places and around the world. families with
financial reserves could provide a steady flow of new information by
accessing the latest books and publications. Initiating students
into the language should be the primary focus of education. Unless
the power of language is experienced intrinsically, the individual
cannot self express. His or her ability to create solutions or even
give expression to problems is contingent on his/her language power.
Prior to 1918, virtually all American institutions for learning had
a custom of teaching the art of oratory and eloquence.
This emphasis served several
functions, but, most importantly, it developed in the individual, a
sensitivity for hearing and grasping the inference or meaning of
words through the examination of inflection, emphasis and
definition. We could call this an audio form of literacy possibly a
pre-curser to reading literacy, and no doubt a fundamental
ingredient in the development of cognitive thinking skills. As the
new Pedagogy installed in 1918 expanded and replaced the old system
reading literacy declined. The close quarters of assembly line
participation necessitated a congenial atmosphere where men and
women would of necessity center thought around non controversial
concerns, such as holidays, sports, charitable and political
organizations.
Certainly in no way could industry
(whose labor force structure was in the form of a pyramid having few
at the top and many at the base) allow for forensic style discussion
in the work place. Concern for social values and ‘good citizenship’
created a language pattern barren of academic controversy, and while
such a fixation may have served to cause our industrial expansion,
it will not serve us in a competitive global market, where again we
need to be language resourceful.
*******************************************************
In a country where millions remain
economically isolated, living in communities where crime and poverty
are common themes, the idea of changelessness is not only futile;
but immoral. Tofler argues, “Inequality is not in itself inherently
immoral, what is immoral is a system that freezes the
maldistribution of those resources that give power.” Clearly, as we
move to the twenty first century, we must underscore knowledge,
especially knowledge about knowledge, as among those maldistributed
resources. Our questions becomes one of wonder: why do our schools
lumber along in a state of changelessness, while all around them,
the informational gap between the economically successful and the
economically disillusioned broadens in exponential leaps? We are
pressed to concede that standards based education as was, and is yet
executed by our schools satisfied the purpose for which it was
intended by the end of the 50’s. We are not as a rule, students of
surplus impact; and yet, the introduction of new surpluses is the
very means by which our culture has, for good or ill, remained in a
constant state of change.
The surpluses introduced on the wings
of industrial development, changed our twentieth century
understanding of culture in America. The very meaning of community,
of time and space, of present and future altered and expanded in
ways no one could possibly have anticipated. The broad based
multidimensional impact of surplus on culture is extensive. The
creation of leisure, both productive and non productive, is perhaps
the most intangible cultural impact. Productive leisure infers the
development of language and attitudes necessary to the harnessing
and direction of time and money into productive investments and
humanitarian services. The accumulative succession of wealth enjoyed
by some families generation to generation, brings with it the
language, knowledge, and experience to continue in the mode of
perpetual wealth creation and civic expansion. But for those not
previously initiated into the order of excess and leisure, and
therefore not adept in their applications and uses; leisure and
excess hold unpredictable consequence: some good, some not so good.
Nonproductive leisure infers the non-development of language and
attitudes necessary to the harnessing and direction of time and
money into productive investments and humanitarian services.
For the purposes of simplicity this
paper will reflect on only two ways that leisure is created. The
first is leisure created by State surplus that comes in the form of
welfare and entitlements. The second is a leisure created and
enforced by labor laws and industrial need. In the context of this
writing, knowledge, information and exposure to experience are not
necessarily assumed to provide a positive orientation. Mailer’s
writing sample is an example: “Consider”, Mailer wrote, “the actual
case of two young men beating to death a sweetshop owner. Did it not
have its beneficial aspect? “One murders not only a weak
fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private
property, one enters into a new relationship with the police and
introduces a dangerous element into ones life; Since rage when
turned inwards, was dangerous to creativity, was not violence, when
used, externalized and vented, itself creative?”
The above serves to reflect the
possible behavioral impact that a language intense knowledge carrier
can exert. It also infers the vulnerability of persons who have time
and no excess wealth as in the case of welfare recipients, and
marginal wage earners. There will be those who would argue that
leisure granted through welfare provision should if anything make it
more possible for one to advance upwards in knowledge and skill. Why
wouldn’t someone take full advantage of the time? The elements which
make and give definition to goals and achievement are forethought of
mind, ambition of spirit, and initiative in reality. Each of these
is given structure through language. As schools veered away from
language as a primary mission, and became more relational to
industry, and therefore non-controversial in focus, appreciation for
the verbal arts diminished. Forensic or argumentative inquiry once
used to evoke a higher use for language; now dissolved under the
either of textbooks exhibiting a one sided picture of events.
Ethics, aesthetic values, multidimensional cause and effect
relationships, etc.; were not valued in the context of an industrial
focus.
The deletion of argumentative inquiry
relative to the questions of ethics, aesthetic values, and
multidimensional cause and effect relationships, invalidated whole
portions of our collective human experience. In the absence of this
language experience, enormous portions of the vocabulary base and
the subsequent patterns of speech were abated. Replacing the deeper
exchanges available in dialogue and debate came a ‘standards
program’ disposed to fixating on events, places, and dates
(1492,1621,1776, the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, etc.).
Regurgitating dates and associating
them with names and events became the basis of reward and the
meaning of ‘good citizenship’. A hundred math problems of similar
complexity, completed without error, earned the student a mark of
outstanding attainment. By naming the four food groups, and listing
an example of each one; the student received an immediate
acknowledgement of success. The deeper intrigues: what role ethics,
aesthetic values, knowledge or the lack thereof played in shaping
the historic outcomes we would come to define as events; were given
little if any weight. Without a strong language base and the ability
to use it, environmental and political circumstance are seen as the
determiners of destiny. “Creative freedom”, writes Finley Carpenter,
“is a correlate of thought, and the more people tend to flee from
thinking, to seek substitutes for it...the more vulnerable they are
to external pressures; in short, the more they fit the deterministic
mold.” Individuals, who have not been successfully initiated in
language use, have no means by which to translate themselves into
active participants in the design of their own destiny. They are
both reliant and vulnerable to the language stimulus coming to them
from environmental and political sources. In the absence of
language, imitation becomes the primary law of survival.
What is valued in the environment, is
that which is imitated. Power is considered of high value in most
circles, whether it is attained through legitimate or illegitimate
means. Those who attain a position of conspicuous power, through
whatever means, (guns, gangs, drugs, political campaigning, virtue,
or other vice), will likely be the ones emulated in the behaviors
and speech of the imitator. Leisure created from State surplus,
which is not enhanced by a dynamic educational experience, can lead
to volatile, explosive and erosive circumstance.. The impact of new
monies on the wage earner effected the individual psyche in an
unprecedented manner. Families and individuals who found not only an
excess of time but also, had income excess, entered into new ground.
Defining the purpose and meaning of life from these stations of
excess drove a generation to experiment in altered states of
consciousness induced through meditation, drugs or religious
conversion. Alternate life styles allowing for the experiencing of
intimate relationships without commitment became a sacred, if not
moral right; illegitimate births and divorce rates increased.
This new found sense of confidence
and security, gained from what appeared to be the permanence of an
industrial livelihood, provided individuals a forum for risk taking
not available to earlier generations. The risk taking had it’s short
falls. Single mothers, drug addiction, etc. placed a new burden on
State surplus. To maintain that surplus, taxes increased from a
modest 4% in 1954 to 24.4% in 1986, placing more stress on the
traditional family. Additional taxes cut family buying power forcing
more women into the labor market. The care and education of children
fell increasingly in the hands of schools and day care facilities.
On the plus side of the surplus spectrum, investment in
technological research yielded a revolution of it’s own. That tiny
chip created from ‘worthless sand’, would extend the human brain as
the machines of yesterday extended human muscle. Robotics, satellite
communication, and computers altered the way we viewed the world and
workplaces of tomorrow. New industries and new systems of wealth
creation, hit the shores of every industrialized country at the same
time. While the world changed around them, schools remained
fundamentally the same.
What did change in the school,
was what came through the door. Day by day, children disenfranchised
from the traditional family, entered schools unprepared, sometimes
unfed, and language deficient. The disciplined sat side-by-side with
the undisciplined; the well fed by the hungry; the verbally
proficient by the verbally weak; and the abused by the loved. The
only common bond between them, was a homogenous strand of diluted
and fragmented information. The school now assumed a two fold
purpose: 1) to serve as a tutorial half-way house for socially and
economically misinformed students and parents, and 2) to remain as
the accredited liaison between students and their academic
scholarship.
The disparity between rich and poor
can no longer be gauged in terms of assets and dollars. Indeed a far
more meaningful disparity exists in the distribution of knowledge.
Standards based education can only promote that which it was
designed to promote. It cannot serve to bridge the ever widening
informational gap between those whose ability to access the new
information is experiential years ahead of those who lack the
resources and connectedness to do the same Creativity and a personal
sense of mastery to accommodate the unprecedented opportunities and
demands of the immediate decade ahead, are paramount to our well
being as a people, a nation, a global community. Our schools must
now embrace a training of character, being, or essence as it were,
to prepare the children of the world of tomorrow for a future of
non-predescribed positions. The schools must produce energetic,
creative, well rounded experiences who are able to bridge gender,
race, and creed and still maintain an inherent code of values which
will allow them the ability to act deliberately and compassionately
on a plethora of new curves and bends in the road. Our standards
based education accommodated a scenario where the general populace
could flourish by learning a simple set of commands and perform them
with diligence and accuracy. “A's" for correct answers garnering
promotion to other levels. The schools to equate and meet reality
(or the macrocosm) as it were must shake-off the old format to
create a microcosm which will enliven the cognitive centers of
creativity and dialogue for it’s constituents to be truly prepared
for the job markets of the 21st century.
