Deming philosophy in educ LO8901

Marion Brady (mbrady@digital.net)
Tue, 6 Aug 1996 06:09:40 -0400 (EDT)

Replying to LO8856 --

[Host's Note: Marion references two msgs -- New Technical Service Model
LO8844, Deming philosophy in educ LO8856. ...Rick]

I've been "away" for several months--have stayed on the list but
just had too much to do to dare even reading for fear I'd get pulled in
again.
This morning, however, I've a little time and reluctantly yield to
temptation. [Host's Note: That'll teach you, Marion!]
Despite knowing that it's usually a mistake to come in in the
middle of a conversation, I think I see enough that's familiar to risk a
comment or two. Several statements in LOs 8844 and 8856 prompt me to do
so, but I'll note particularly this one from Robert Bacal:

"The moral of course is that quality is defined by the customer."

Those on the list who know me from way back may remember my
raising questions about this proposition. I think perhaps I might have
quoted from the introduction to a book of mine, and am about to do so
again. I don't want to be tiresome, but as H. G. Wells noted, "Human
history becomes, more and more, a race between education and catastrophe."
My belief in the centrality of education, and my conviction that right now
catastrophe has the edge, push me to risk irritating someone by repeating
a little 19th century story to help me make my point:

A boiler tender at a factory in a small town had responsibility
for blowing the noon whistle. Every morning as he walked to work he would
set his watch by the clock mounted on a pole in front of the jewelry store
on Main Street.
He had occasion one Saturday to be in the jewelry store and, being
of curious mind, asked the jeweler how he kept the store's clock on such
perfect time.
"Easy," said the jeweler. "I set it every day when the noon
whistle blows."

The educational establishment is long on high-sounding objectives
(e.g. "Students are being prepared for useful, satisfying work," for
"democratic citizenship," to "solve social problems," to "actualize
themselves," etc.) but even if these were acceptable statements of the
overarching purpose of education--which in my opinion they're not--it's a
real stretch to connect what's happening on a daily basis in most
classrooms to them. What really shapes and drives what's going on in
today's classrooms is what went on yesterday. And what went on yesterday
is "explained" by what went on the day, the month, the year, the decade,
the generation before.
We teach what we were taught because we think it's important. But
we think it's important primarily because it's what we were taught.
Round and round we go, victims of institutionalization. The
purpose of education is to expand our understanding of reality. To that
end, academic disciplines focusing on some (but by no means all, or even
the most important) aspects of reality were devised. Now, teaching those
disciplines has become more important than exploring the reality the
disciplines were originally designed to model.
We're going nowhere. In fact, on balance, I'd say we were
currently slipping backwards. I'm not a basher of education. I sincerely
believe that the schools are, on balance, doing a better job of doing what
they've always done than they've ever done before, and that people like
Deb Meier with her Central Park East effort are telling us how to do even
better.
But we're basically running around in circles, confined by a
fundamental failure to grasp the nature of the task at hand. Beyond the
skills (reading, writing, computation) stage, American education, top to
bottom, is shaped entirely by economic, social, and political goals (e.g.
"preparation for useful, satisfying work," "preparation for democratic
citizenship, etc." Those objectives--even if classroom teachers were to
focus on them rather than on doing better what was done to them when they
were in school--don't even come close to being good enough.
We're in crisis. We need (excuse the overworked phrase) a
paradigm shift, need to understand that biology, chemistry, math,
sociology, history and all the other comfortably familiar fields of study
are not only mere means to an end, but poor ones at that--ignoring vast
and important areas of knowledge, failing to show the systemic nature of
reality, placing students in passive roles, making it difficult or
impossible to trace the kinds of relationships by means of which knowledge
expands . . . (I could go on and on, and have elsewhere).
We have a lousy curriculum. It's always been a lousy curriculum.
And playing around with the traditional random bits and pieces has us
setting our curricular clocks by our curricular whistles, blowing our
curricular whistles on schedule with our curricular clocks, and being
reassured by their synchronicity.
Bad news. Every day the pace of social change widens the gap
between what we need to know and what we teach.
Let me say (again) what I've said on this list, and what I've been
saying for thirty years:

EVERY SOCIETY HAS A MODEL OF REALITY--A BODY OF KNOWLEDGE AND A
WAY OF ORGANIZING THAT KNOWLEDGE. IF THIS KNOWLEDGE AND ITS ORGANIZING
SCHEME ARE MADE EXPLICIT AND FORMALIZED, IT WILL CONSTITUTE EACH SOCIETY'S
OPTIMUM DESIGN FOR GENERAL STUDY.

It'll take far more than a quick read of this proposition to grasp
the implications of the supradisciplinary approach to education it
mandates. I first laid the idea out in one- and two-syllable words in a
book published by a university press, followed it with articles in a half
dozen or so respected journals, wrote a course of study operationalizing
it that most middle school students can handle with no difficulty, and the
idea has yet to "register" with the educational establishment. (That
paradigm thing, you know.) However, my work with students from the
elementary level to graduate school convinces me that whatever effort it
takes is worth it. The few who explore it tell me they "can't go back."
It's utter simplicity, its naturalness, its familiarity, its erasure of
the major recognized problems with the existing "general education"
curriculum (an ugly, complicated thing cobbled together from a random mix
of specialized studies) is surely the reason.
Not that "simplicity, naturalness, and familiarity" make it easily
grasped (except by kids). (That paradigm thing, that "a fish would be the
last to discover water" phenomena, is the major reason why.)
Yes, I lnow. I'm coming on like Thomas Paine. But I believe the
situation warrants it. This list has on it more movers and shakers
outside the field of education than any other of which I know. I'd like
to convince them (you?) of the possibility that a little judicious moving
and shaking of the educational establishment--or at least your local
representatives of it--have the potential for increasing by several orders
of magnitude the quality of the images of and assumptions about reality
your kids will carry with them through life.

--

Marion

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