Session Information
23 SES 11 A, Educating a Knowledge Society: Governing/Government Through Floating Signifiers, Information Systems and Navigation Tools (Part 2)
Symposium continued from 23 SES 10 A
Time:
2009-09-30
16:45-18:15
Room:
HG, HS 28
Chair:
Thomas S. Popkewitz
Discussant:
Monica Mincu
Contribution
What have universal human rights, globalised citizenship, facility with computer games, and outcomes (standards) based curricular regimes all got in common? The answer suggested in this essay is that they all converge on the construction of the individualised global citizen (Said’s cosmopolitan rather than local citizen). The central cognitive competence required to be a competent cosmopolitan is mastery of abstraction. This essay will trace the growth of this particular cognitive competence via a brief review of the rise of IQ scores across the globe (the so-called ‘Flynn Effect’), and will show that what increases is not general or cultural intelligence but abstract intelligence. This grasp of abstraction will be related to the ‘fluid intelligence’ (ability to solve new problems, sometimes referred to by the floating signifier of ‘learning to learn’) required inter alia by increasingly technical computers games and by certain requirements of outcomes based curricular regimes, which is one explanation for their recurrent global popularity, as noted in a number of sessions at ECER 2008.
The paper will reflect on the variable prospects of outcomes regimes for fostering abstraction, and hence for being an efficient instrument of governing cosmopolitanism. The paper will close by reflecting on the sad paradox that curricular regimes in developing countries (like South Africa) continue to emphasize contextual, real world knowledge and skills, often at the expense of abstract knowledge, thereby failing in their governing mission, instead, preparing learners to be local citizens in a pre-global world. This is the new reproduction of disadvantage in the global knowledge society.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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