Session Information
32 SES 08 A, Social Innovation in Education. Part 2: Pathways and directions of Social Innovation
Symposium continued from 32 SES 07 A
Contribution
The modern school can hardly be said to be the ‘free time’ and ‘free space’ that is suggested in the original meaning of the Greek word ‘schole.’ Whereas privately funded forms of education may still be able to pursue their ‘own’ agenda (bearing in mind that the question who actually ‘owns’ private education is a complex one), public education is increasingly seen as an investment of society in its own future. Hence society claims the right to expect something from education, and not only puts the public education system under pressure to ‘deliver’ but also uses extensive ‘accountability regimes’ (Biesta 2004) to make sure that that education delivers what it is expected to deliver, and that it does so at the highest level of (competitive) quality. Over the past decades many scholars have criticised the rise of punitive accountability regimes, particularly those that are fed by the Global Education Measurement Industry (Biesta 2015). The critique is not just about the validity of what is being measured but also about the rise of performativity (Ball 2003; Jeffrey & Trotman 2012), where ‘scoring’ becomes an aim in itself and the main driver of the behaviour of education systems. While schools may become very effective in ‘playing the system,’ these developments seriously undermine the educational ‘mission’ of the school (see Ravitch 2010) and increase levels of cynicism within the system. If education in such a ‘responsive mode’ is guided by a rhetoric of constant innovation – on the mistaken but common assumption that innovation would equal improvement – there is a question whether this is the only mode for public education or whether, perhaps in addition to innovation, education should also pay attention to a different mode, which we could characterise as ‘conservative’ in the literal sense of having to do with conservation. In my presentation I will explore the latter mode by returning to a text from Neil Postman that was published in 1979 under the title ‘Teaching as a conserving activity’ (Postman 1979). I will reconstruct and critically examine Postman’s idea of education as a ‘thermostat’ of society in order to explore where contemporary public education might ‘sit’ on the innovation-conservation spectrum and what strategies might be available for public education to enact its ‘duty to resist’ (Meirieu 2007).
References
Ball, S.J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18[2], 215-228. Jeffrey, B. & Troman, G. (Eds)(2012), Performativity in UK education: Ethnographic cases of its effects, agency and reconstructions. Painswick: E&E Publishing. Biesta, G.J.J. (2004). Education, accountability and the ethical demand. Can the democratic potential of accountability be regained? Educational Theory, 54[3], 233-250. Biesta, G.J.J. (2015). Resisting the Seduction of the Global Education Measurement Industry: Notes on the Social Psychology of PISA. Ethics and education 10(3), 348-360. Merieu, P. (2007). Pédagogie : Le devoir de résister. [Education: The duty to resist.] Ussy-les-Moulineaux: ESF Editeur. Postman, N. (1979). Teaching as a conserving activity. New York: Delacorte Press. Ravitch, D. (2010). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.
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