I deeply hate to focus on merely one aspect of the incredibly rich texts we read for this week, but I stopped clearly on this paragraph from the Giroux:
Having taught in high schools in the early-to-mid-2000s, I witnessed firsthand both the increasing vocationalism and renewed vigor of neoconservative cultual warriors. Upon graduating with my B.A. in 2002, the Sword of Damocles over my head was exactly how I was going to apply my English degree to a job market that saw a floundering, restructuring publishing industry and a post-9/11 economic hangover that was jump-starting a frantic hoovering of money from what would later be called the 99% to, well, you get the idea. Working in high schools found me among students not that much younger than I, indoctrinated since middle school that the only function of their education was to make themselves more marketable in the workforce (such programming was certainly active during my education, but I was far too interested in Bill Laswell records and Magic: the Gathering to notice). As a result, the paradigm shift from teaching-to-job-training was particularly jarring. My high school students quickly became increasingly disinterested in the subjects they were taught and much more interested in how things looked on their college applications.
Currently, a good friend of mine is a substitute teacher in Savannah, GA, after spending nearly a decade teaching English in Europe and Asia (mostly Hong Kong and Taiwan). His experience with US-American students has been jarringly different; while there was certainly a vocationalistic element to his teaching in Asia, there was still enough of a dynamic of "you are here to learn something" that he was able to, well, teach. Here in the states, most of his teaching colleagues only serve a test-focused curriculum that, by now, doesn't even serve to train students to do anything except get through menial tasks. There isn't even any attention to context, historical accuracy (or history at all), or even the actual performance of tasks (math students are, directly or otherwise, encouraged to find technological means to solve their homework problems). My mother was an elementary school guidance counselor for 30 years; at the beginning of her career, her curriculum was much more flexible and based on actual child development, but by the time she left, her primary function was to simply determine which students were more likely to misbehave in class to extreme degrees. After COVID set in, and Iowa's state legislature decreed unambiguously that they did not care about the health and safety of educators in the classroom, she ran screaming from the profession (nearly literally).
I have always treated the classroom as a means by which I train students to critically think, considering subjects and subject matter to be the artifacts and catalysts of examination and analysis; however, I've also felt the attack on pedagogy from the Right is the inevitable result of (neo-)liberalism's need to be "civil" and "accepting," a tactic that only really results in centrist "middle ground" politics ostensibly grounded in objectivity, but really just provides a fertile ground for right-wing reactionaries who are more than willing to accept environments in which people can't be held accountable for being hateful and destructive simply because it's their right to be hateful and destructive. Much as elementary and secondary education in this country stagnate because nobody is allowed to be held accountable and the blame for problems gets shifted further onto teachers that aren't allowed to exercise any control, the post-secondary landscape is equally blunted by people who have been conditioned to see college as a burgeoning marketplace, where everything can be negotiated.
All that said, I have to wonder if I, myself, am guilty of what Giroux describes as "reinforcing conservative technologies of regulation" (351); my own pedagogy, while wildly theoretical in practice, tends to be very conservative in execution, and at the end of the day, I do demand that my students both adhere to the guidelines of their syllabus and, for instance, participate in class discussions.
Frankly, I think any pedagogical reform that would constitute a positive step would effectively repudiate the notion of any classroom (from pre-school up) as an apolitical, neutral space. Public education is political by its very nature, and the surest sign of a dead culture is that it does not train its youth to replace them.
My questions are rather pedestrian: 1) Is it possible to have a pedagogy that is inherently apolitical or acultural? Is a cultural neutral, middle ground truly possible from a pedagogical standpoint?
and
2) Why is the prevailing cultural discourse inherently tied to avoiding antagonism? What motives do left, right, and center have to maintain civil interaction?
These are hard times for educators and advocates of democratic schooling. Beseiged by the growing forces of vocationalism and the neoconservative cultural warriors, prospective and existing classroom teachers are caught in an ideological crossfire regarding the civic and political responsibilities they assume as engaged critics and cultural theorists. Asked to define themselves either through the language of the marketplace or through a discourse of liberal objectivity and neutrality that abstracts the political from the realm of the cultural and sopcial, educators are increasingly being pressured to become either servants of corporate power or disengaged specialists wedded to the imperatives of a resurgent and debasing academic professionalism.(343)
Having taught in high schools in the early-to-mid-2000s, I witnessed firsthand both the increasing vocationalism and renewed vigor of neoconservative cultual warriors. Upon graduating with my B.A. in 2002, the Sword of Damocles over my head was exactly how I was going to apply my English degree to a job market that saw a floundering, restructuring publishing industry and a post-9/11 economic hangover that was jump-starting a frantic hoovering of money from what would later be called the 99% to, well, you get the idea. Working in high schools found me among students not that much younger than I, indoctrinated since middle school that the only function of their education was to make themselves more marketable in the workforce (such programming was certainly active during my education, but I was far too interested in Bill Laswell records and Magic: the Gathering to notice). As a result, the paradigm shift from teaching-to-job-training was particularly jarring. My high school students quickly became increasingly disinterested in the subjects they were taught and much more interested in how things looked on their college applications.
Currently, a good friend of mine is a substitute teacher in Savannah, GA, after spending nearly a decade teaching English in Europe and Asia (mostly Hong Kong and Taiwan). His experience with US-American students has been jarringly different; while there was certainly a vocationalistic element to his teaching in Asia, there was still enough of a dynamic of "you are here to learn something" that he was able to, well, teach. Here in the states, most of his teaching colleagues only serve a test-focused curriculum that, by now, doesn't even serve to train students to do anything except get through menial tasks. There isn't even any attention to context, historical accuracy (or history at all), or even the actual performance of tasks (math students are, directly or otherwise, encouraged to find technological means to solve their homework problems). My mother was an elementary school guidance counselor for 30 years; at the beginning of her career, her curriculum was much more flexible and based on actual child development, but by the time she left, her primary function was to simply determine which students were more likely to misbehave in class to extreme degrees. After COVID set in, and Iowa's state legislature decreed unambiguously that they did not care about the health and safety of educators in the classroom, she ran screaming from the profession (nearly literally).
I have always treated the classroom as a means by which I train students to critically think, considering subjects and subject matter to be the artifacts and catalysts of examination and analysis; however, I've also felt the attack on pedagogy from the Right is the inevitable result of (neo-)liberalism's need to be "civil" and "accepting," a tactic that only really results in centrist "middle ground" politics ostensibly grounded in objectivity, but really just provides a fertile ground for right-wing reactionaries who are more than willing to accept environments in which people can't be held accountable for being hateful and destructive simply because it's their right to be hateful and destructive. Much as elementary and secondary education in this country stagnate because nobody is allowed to be held accountable and the blame for problems gets shifted further onto teachers that aren't allowed to exercise any control, the post-secondary landscape is equally blunted by people who have been conditioned to see college as a burgeoning marketplace, where everything can be negotiated.
All that said, I have to wonder if I, myself, am guilty of what Giroux describes as "reinforcing conservative technologies of regulation" (351); my own pedagogy, while wildly theoretical in practice, tends to be very conservative in execution, and at the end of the day, I do demand that my students both adhere to the guidelines of their syllabus and, for instance, participate in class discussions.
Frankly, I think any pedagogical reform that would constitute a positive step would effectively repudiate the notion of any classroom (from pre-school up) as an apolitical, neutral space. Public education is political by its very nature, and the surest sign of a dead culture is that it does not train its youth to replace them.
My questions are rather pedestrian: 1) Is it possible to have a pedagogy that is inherently apolitical or acultural? Is a cultural neutral, middle ground truly possible from a pedagogical standpoint?
and
2) Why is the prevailing cultural discourse inherently tied to avoiding antagonism? What motives do left, right, and center have to maintain civil interaction?
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