The big picture.
One of the thoughts which kept coming back as I read The Big Picture was why Dennis Littky’s ideas have not been more widely adopted. As he says himself in Chapter Nine; “The Met is actually based on some of the most mainstream ideas and widely accepted theories in numerous disciplines.” [his emphasis]. He refers constantly to John Dewey who published Experience and education in 1936 and links his initiatives to writers like Ivan Illich and Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner who published their ideas at the beginning of the Nineteen Seventies. What that means is that these ideas were current and widely accepted before almost all of us began our teacher training. So I have to ask why hasn’t this movement to reform schools made more headway? Why are we seeing retrograde steps like standardised tests becoming educational practice in more and more first world countries?
Littky does not offer an answer to this as far as I can see, but he does refer to the work of Seymour Sarason whose analysis of the problem in The culture of the school and the problem of change covers the issue of power and control. This book belongs to a rich tradition of social analysis often called Critical Theory. Critical theorists make much use of the writings of Max Weber and have one overarching question, who benefits from this? If Littky’s reforms were implemented in New Zealand our students would benefit; so who is it who benefits from perpetuating the present system? Clearly not the students.
The history of education in European societies can give us a clue. The word school itself comes from the Greek word for leisure, reminding us that the men who learnt from Socrates and the other philosophers in Athens were young men of leisure. They had leisure because the work of their households was done by women and slaves. Athenian society may have been the most enlightened society of its time but it was still a repressive society which did not believe in universal education. They didn’t need to and didn’t want to educate everyone. Education was a privilege.
Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, was the first Anglo Saxon king to be able to read and write. For a long time Christian states only bothered to teach a specific class within their societies to read and write, the monks and clerics. The movement in Scotland during the eighteenth century to educate all its citizens sprang from another set of religious motivations. The Church of Scotland wanted its congregation to be able to read the Bible. That tradition brought the impulse for universal education to New Zealand with the Scottish immigrants to Otago. In other countries like England, the movement towards universal education, (so well described by Charles Dickens in such novels as Nicholas Nickleby, Hard Times and Great Expectations), came from the needs of a growing industrial society to have an educated class who could design, build and operate the new machinery of transportation and production. Even then, as Littky points out, [Page 29, the Committee of 10] most early Twentieth Century governments only wanted the great majority of its citizens to have just a basic education.
I suggest, therefore, that there is a sector of our community, which is happy with the way things are, which sees the long tail of under achievement as a pool of cheap labour or cannon fodder, but are conflicted when they consider how this underclass presents problems of crime and social unrest. They are conflicted because they want to do something about this underclass, but they don’t want to give them opportunities to lead more enriching lives. If this analysis is correct, educational reform will be tolerated, but the cost of making worthwhile changes and the creation of a more just and equitable society will be resisted. Postman and Weingartner right at the beginning of their book, Teaching as a subversive activity, have this to say: In our society, as in others, we find that there are influential men [and women] at the head of important institutions who can not afford to be found wrong, who find change inconvenient, perhaps intolerable, and who have financial or political interests they must conserve at any cost. Such men [and women] are, therefore, threatened in many respects by the theory of the democratic process and the concept of an ever-renewing society. Moreover, we find that there are obscure men [and women] who do not lead important institutions who are similarly threatened because they have identified themselves with certain ideas and institutions which they wish to keep free from either criticism or change.
So is educational change doomed to failure before it begins? In a later book, The predictable failure of educational reform (1990), Seymour Sarason says “It is noteworthy, indeed symptomatic, that the proponents of educational reform do not talk about change to the educational system. They will couch their reforms in terms of improving schools or the quality of education. And if there is any doubt they have other than the most superficial conception of the educational system, that doubt disappears when one examines their remedies which add up to ‘we will do what we have been doing or what we ought to be doing only we will now do it better’ ” Does Sarason’s criticism include Littky? I think a fair reading of The Big Picture will suggest that Littky’s reforms go well beyond what Sarason is criticising. Perhaps Elliot Eisner in Cognition and curriculum reconsidered best expresses what I’m feeling; “What is pessimistic is an unwillingness or an inability to recognise the magnitude of the task, to be sucked up into a heady but naive optimism about “what works”, to hop aboard any passing bandwagon that rolls along to the loudest music.”
Littky’s final chapter, however, offers a way forward, a series of initiatives which could be applied to many campaigns to reform, not just education, but also any other social problem. This, I suggest, is the most enduring part of the book, but it also raises the issue of apathy, and that is another thread to this tangled tapestry.
