Post-Fordist Education

'Pedagogy of Human Capital': Stewart Martin on the post-Fordist crisis of progressive education.

Post-Fordism’s appetite for self-directed activity is bringing about a crisis in progressive education. No longer perceived as threatening, a work force trained to think for itself has become highly desirable. So what should an emancipatory education entail today?

I tried to get at this question from the opposite side in "Rethinking Domination and Resistance, where I argued that the worries about the oppression of progressive forms of education are problems for people who don't really have problems. People who are more overtly oppressed don't have any doubts about whether it is happening or not.

As I've said, I think emancipatory education must involve teaching skills that actually generate collective power, which progressive education does not.

Mr. Big, WordGirl, and Imagineering

Posted, too, at Schools Matter:

Last evening Benjamin Barber was on with Bill Moyers talking about the imminent suicide in the works for American capitalism. While some capitalists work to create products that people actually need to make their lives more livable, the American model is based on using advertising to manufacture a need that no one has until they view the ad. See Elmo and IPhone.

WordGirl, the PBS cartoon superhero actually has a great children's explanation of the phenomenon, but unfortunately, the villainous businessman, Mr. Big, is the only villain we cannot view on any of the clips from the PBS site. I guess we wouldn't want children to start questioning buying practices right around Xmas. So here is Bill Moyers's summary:

On this weekend before Christmas, I'm struck by a paradox. The news is not so joyous. Housing prices and home sales down…more foreclosures predicted…oil near $100 a barrel…the dollar's sinking food prices rising recession looming and yet, on television, and just about everywhere we look, people squeezed to the breaking point are constantly being told to buy buy buy.

AD: Why not let your kids decide?

BILL MOYERS: And if necessary, to go into hock to do it.

AD: Its easy! Even if you've been turned down before, you could be driving."

BILL MOYERS: Commercials even go out of their way to make adults into children and children into consumers.

AD: Make sure you get the right highlighter.

WORLDGIRL: WordGirl!!

BILL MOYERS: There is some resistance to this constant commercializing. Watching early morning cartoons with my grandchildren the other day, I discovered word girl the PBS series of a fifth grade superhero fighting evil with her amazing vocabulary

WORLDGIRL: Listen for the words vague and specific

BILL MOYERS: In this episode, the villain, Mr. Big, has flooded the market with a brand new product called 'the thing' which everyone has to have

WORLDGIRL EXCERPT: "THE THING" can do all sorts of stuff! Get one today at a low, low price.

BILL MOYERS: What is it? No one knows or seems to care but as commercials for the thing hit the airwaves, citizens everywhere are seduced into believing they can't live without it, so they descend in droves to buy as many as they can get. Enter: Word Girl!

WORDGIRL: Everyone stop, you're being tricked! The Thing doesn't do anything!

PERSON 1: Yes it does! It does so much stuff!

PERSON 2: The commercial says I needed one for my boat!

WORDGIRL: You don't have a boat!

PERSON 2: Hon, we need a boat for our THING!

WORDGIRL: You don't need a THING!

PERSON 2: But the commercial says !

BILL MOYERS: Watching all this, it seemed a good time to put in a call to Benjamin Barber. Like WordGirl, he's standing athwart history and shouting stop.

You may remember Benjamin Barber from his international best seller, JIHAD VERSUS MCWORLD. Among other things, he's a renowned political theorist and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos — a public policy think tank here in New York City.

His latest book is CONSUMED, about how the global economy produces too many goods we don't need, too few of those we do need, and, to keep the racket going, targets children as consumers in a market where shopping is a twenty-four hour business. Capitalism, he says, "seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain." Benjamin Barber answered my call - and he's with me now.

The same kind of consumer capitalism and marketeering has struck our civic establishments, including our educational institutions. Choice is first, the customer is always right, and control of market share is based on convincing the customer you have a better deal for him than the next guy. In K-12 education, such thinking is quickly eroding the civic responsibility for educating the nation's children toward perpetuation of the moral and political values of the Republic. Never mind that the charter choices and the voucher choices never get close to offering the pickings of the wealthy who can afford real choices. Charters and vouchers are choices for the poor and are made attractive by advertisers and media and the New York Times, all intent upon keeping the poor quiet and invisible. How else to explain the NY Times headline, "Charter Schools Outshine Others as They Receive Their First Report Cards," when the story goes on to tell how the City cherry-picked 13 charters to get the superior results they need to justify their charterizing.

The marketeering has struck the American university as well, and the advertising battle for students will undoubtedly continue to yield "new and improved" program configurations that can be completed by consumer students in less time with less sacrifice and with more convenience for the consumer/student. Never mind that the adjuncts hired to teach these "technology-rich" courses are choking on the keyboarded and semi-literate "dialogue" that students churn out while lounging in their jammies on the sofa. If the time were actually counted for these overworked adjuncts and instructors in these techno courses, it would probably be less than minimum wage at most universities.

Of course, the Top Tier universities do not have to clamor for customers and, therefore, are not forced to compete in the great unwashed marketplace of compressed credentials. So while the less endowed colleges and universities actively battle with their compression algorithms in the enrollment wars, the Top Tier benefit from a national marketing strategy that has convinced a public, now bulging, yet hungry for more stuff, that a college degree is the THING that everyone needs, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The degree THING does stuff and gets you stuff, right? But we all know the REAL THING only exists in those colleges and universities that don't have to compete for customers, where, in fact, the customers are competing to get enrolled so that they can get the REAL THING.

In the meantime, those who don't have a chance to get the THING, and certainly not the REAL THING, become acquiescent to their fate, and thus, quite convinced to take anything offered them as a way to survive the American dream that no one will wake them from. And those who do get their THING? They find out that everyone they know already has one, too, and it really doesn't do most of the stuff that it was supposed to do. And all those expensive texts and books that haven't been sold back yet? They will go into rental storage or portable storage with all the other THINGS that we have traded the best parts of our souls to obtain. Did you hear that Britney's sister is pregnant?

So our brand of capitalism is entirely bankrupt, and it is only a matter of time until the final death rattle sets in unless things change. But being the avid and ever-optimistic educator, I know change is possible. One small example provided by Benjamin Barber last evening: LifeStraws.

Remember that capitalism used to be about creating and providing products the people actually need? What do most people need now for which there is a great shortage that is likely to get worse? Water. One small Danish company is getting very, very rich on products that people need that can solve a problem, rather than create another one. They call it IMAGINEERING. I love it. Now here is a real holiday gift idea:

There are gadgets that make life more fun, and then there are gadgets that make life possible. The LifeStraw from Denmark's Vestergaard Frandsen Group has the potential to fall into the latter category. A device about the size of a large pen or drinking straw, the LifeStraw is a complete water purification kit that draws its power from the person sucking down the water. The LifeStraw is the product of ten years of development work, based on the goal of creating an efficient, affordable water-purification system for the developing world, where water-borne illnesses are a major killer. When produced in quantity, each LifeStraw — which uses a combination of mesh filters, iodine-impregnated beads and active carbon to remove particulate matter and bacteria — is expected to cost under $2 and be able to provide a year's worth of pure drinking water. . . .

Coopted by Foundations? (Community Organizing and Urban Education)

[To read the entire series, go here.]

Foundations like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford have a corrosive influence on a democratic society; they represent relatively unregulated and unaccountable concentrations of power and wealth which buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society's attention.

--Arnove, cited in Barker, "Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions?"

Community organizing groups often pride themselves by their refusal of any government money. The general agreement among organizers on this issue rests on very good reasons, grounded on a long history of co-optation of organizing by governmental institutions seeking to eliminate grassroots resistance. During the 1960s, for example, there was a small window of time within which the government actually tried to fund grassroots collective action. This quickly pissed off the powers that be (especially the local powers that be that were most affected by empowered citizens) and the funding was quickly cut or shifted into more service oriented work. (Fisher's Let the People Decide gives a nice overview of this history). Today, nearly all "community groups" funded by government sources focus almost exclusively on "service" projects. "Community organizing" in organizations like these looks little or nothing like the kind of power focused collective action and institution-building I've been discussing in this series. And in part because these organizations are mostly "professionalized" at the higher levels, they are generally run by people who have little connection to the communities they are located in.

This is especially true for schools, of course. With few exceptions, the only "community" people in inner city schools are support personnel and aides in extremely marginalized positions.

While this refusal of government funding is informed by long experience, it has meant that most local organizing groups depend on foundation funding for their existence. Yes, organizing groups, especially those based in coalitions of organizations like the congregational groups I am most familiar with, try to generate funding out of their members. But without significant foundation funding, as I understand it, most would limp along at best.

This brings us to Michael Barker's just published pair of essays, "Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions?" (see Part One and Part Two). Barker's intent is mostly to focus on the ways in which foundation funding prevents radical social change designed to transform capitalism. I'm not exactly opposed to such a transformation if it could be made pragmatically effective and workable, but I'm not holding my breath. However, his articles draw together a range of interesting writings about the ways foundations often try to soften and de-radicalize the efforts to community organizing and other social action groups.

To extend somewhat on Barker's argument, as I have argued elsewhere in this series, "progressive" activism is grounded in the emergence of what was essentially a middle-class professional movement at the turn of the 20th Century. Stromquist's book on social class and the progressive movement, Reinventing "The People", focuses extensively on how foundations funding social change were integrally part of this middle-class "progressivism." And the middle-class progressives (who were, it must be remembered, an alternative to the communists and the union movements) were focused on the idea that social change could occur through the kind of measured dialogue that they, themselves, were used to.

Even for those of us that aren't necessarily pushing for socialist revolution (not that Barker, for example, is this simplistic--he's clearly not) this gives an indication that there may be something fundamentally anti-power and anti-confrontation about the most important foundations of our time (which, in large part, were the most important foundations then as well).

I wonder if one of the key issues about foundations is their tendency on the left to fund "projects" instead of long-term institutional structure, like the foundations on the right are more likely to do. Barker cites Guilloud and Cordery who note that "funders determine funding trends and non-profits develop programs to bend to these requests rather than assess real needs and realistic goals."

What if foundations on the left instead were more willing to endow local organizing institutions so that they had the independence to do what they thought needed to be done? This, it seems to me, could fundamentally alter the way community organizing groups operate. Instead of constantly grubbing for money and changing their "'product' to bend to" foundation "requests", there might be opportunities for more independent action.

What might such local endowed organizations look like? Along with a friend of mine, I've begun to imagine something like the old settlement house movement:

• where multiple organizations could be housed, rent free;
• where transportation and reimbursement and child-care could be provided to poorer citizens who might then be able to actively participate;
• where a fundraising expert could be permanently sited to identify funds and help relieve organizers from spending so much time finding where there next buck would come from;
• where service providers might also be sited so they could work to support citizens on the margins, again, so that they might actually be able to participate effectively in social action (this aversion to service is another key problem for organizing groups, even though, again, they have good reasons for it);
• that might support interns from the local community on a rotating basis to bring local "expertise" into the building along with "professional" organizers.

Of course, this raises as many questions as it answers. But if someone gave an endowment of, say, 6 million dollars to a collaboration between multiple organizing groups in Milwaukee, only a portion of the interest of which could be spent every year, I wonder how it might change the depressingly limited status of social action and resistance in this community.

Thinking of education, specifically, it might allow the emergence of a permanent grassroots organization with the power to hold the school district accountable over the long term, instead of the kind of momentary and often not sustained engagements that have historically taken place.

(A good example of why this is a problem is the SAGE class-size reduction program that MOVE fought to bring to Milwaukee Public Schools. I have heard that a number of schools are starting to refuse this money because it isn't enough to actually make the program happen and the requirements that come with it saddles them with costs that they then can't really pay. We should be on this. We aren't. In part this is because we're caught up in other complex issues. Our group simply doesn't have the institutional resources to keep good track of what is going on in the moving target that is always the reality of an inner city school district.)

What do other people think?