ABSTRACT
Never mind terrorism or a natural disaster or a pandemic: On a good day, thanks to accountability conservatives, people will die unnecessarily.Speaking of medicine, where is the emphasis on “outcomes” in that profession? Despite pressure to make public statistics regarding the consequences of various treatment protocols, medical practice is not focused on outcomes. Medicine is predicated on those practices indicated by research, tempered by physicians’ judgment. On more than one occasion (take Vioxx, for example), that research must be revised, owing to the cozy relationship between the Republican-dominated Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry. The relationship between many doctors and the drug industry is not exactly distant either, is it? Maybe if test preparation representatives took us golfing or to dinner or on holiday we might be more receptive to standardized exams. I hope not, as standardized tests measure mostly the ability of students to take tests, quantifying what psychologists call “skills,” another empty abstraction, this one rationalizing a wide range of intellectually vacuous activities and the testing of them. Like the drug companies, the Educational Testing Service and other test manufacturers exploit the public for profit.To return to medicine: I remember the first time I learned that approximately 80,000 patients die (and another 150,000 are injured) each year owing to medical errors (Berliner and Biddle 1996, 108). I was sure this was a misprint. (The number is, in fact, contested.) My effort at denial of this allegation was undermined when I heard the figure repeated, as fact, on the CBS Evening News in June (2006), and again on “Sixty Minutes (on March 16, 2008). Did you know that as many 80,000 Americans die owing to medical error each year? And politicians are on our case over a few points on standardized tests? Are these people completely crazy?They’re crazy like a fox. They play on parents’ anxieties over their children’s futures as they distract the public over the consequences of conservative social and fiscal policies, especially those targeting the working poor (McWilliam 2008, 35). Forty years of conservative policies have created conditions no teacher-even one with divine powers-can overcome. Speaking of the divine, where is the accountability for preachers, priests, and rabbis? Have they not been teaching pretty much the same lesson for thousands of years with, well, you have to admit, limited effectiveness. If politicians played the same scapegoating game with preachers, priests, and rabbis that they force on us, more than a few churches and synagogues would be closed for unacceptable outcomes. Where is the accountability for the religion business?There is none. Instead, thousands of people in pulpits rave at millions of Americans each week. Many of these people-I am thinking of fundamentalist preachers for whom being “born again,” not academic study, is the key qualification-are without college degrees, let alone advanced study of the Bible. Fuming and fussing over evolutionary theory, homosexuality, reproductive rights, these self-proclaimed representatives of God often take
an obscure biblical passage to mean, well, just about anything they want it to mean. It always means sending more money to the ministry. For millions of Americans, the only “public intellectual” they hear is an uneducated, self-promoting and, I’d say, often delusional creature screaming at them to think as they command or risk eternal damnation. Nowhere does this happen more often than in the American South (although parts of the Midwest are not far behind).I should say not the American South, which, for me, means Louisiana (where I lived for 20 years): beautiful landscapes, astonishing food, memorable music, and many remarkable individuals. So I should not say the South but, rather, the Confederacy, to specify that it is a political formation to which I refer, not a cultural one. (Admittedly, the boundaries between politics and culture blur.) It is clear to me that what we Americans suffer today is, in part, the triumph of the Confederacy (the South did rise again), laced as it is now (but was not 150 years ago) with religious fundamentalism and fascism, American style.5 (The Bible Belt doesn’t form until after the Civil War, as historian Joel Williamson makes clear.) What elected George W. Bush were, do not forget, the Confederate states. These are the same 11 states that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment 25 years ago, and they are the same 11 states that would vote in favor of a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage. Eight of these 11 states voted against women’s suffrage almost a century ago, once again claiming defense of the family, patriotism, and the inerrancy of the Bible. The failure of the U.S. government to stay the course in the post-bellum reconstruction of the South has proven to be a political disaster for American democracy, something that, despite the witch burning and capitalism, was more a Yankee than Confederate idea for the colonies. It is, then, not only a culture war in which we are engaged. It is, alas, the Civil War. So-called conservative values are, in part, Confederate values. Just as conservatives lie about the founding fathers, converting them into Christians-they certainly were not: Jefferson was skeptical of Christ’s divinity, Ben Franklin was largely indifferent, and Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen were evidently contemptuous of Christianity (Holmes 2006)—conservatives lie about what is at stake when their fellow citizens demand Constitutional protection of their civil rights. Last spring, for example, when legislation was proposed in California to require the teaching of gay and lesbian history in the public schools, a conservative spokesman complained his free speech was being violated.Even if we could rid ourselves of the Republicans, we would still left with the Democrats. Many Democrats supported the passage of No Child Left Behind, now deserted by Democrats (Dillon 2007c, 2008c) and pronounced flawed even by the Bush Administration (Dillon 2008a). Unless we study the past, we cannot understand the present. It is a Confederate, not American, present, in which deferred and displaced gendered anxieties over Cold War confrontations and racist responses to Brown v. Board of Education
and the civil rights movement have morphed into the nightmare that is the present: the evisceration of the curriculum through the political subjugation of teachers.6 Not only have we lost control of the curriculum, we no longer devise the means by which we assess students’ study of it: Without these, our profession is profoundly compromised. The “regressive” moment of the method of currere is an ongoing act of remembrance and testimony, simultaneously a structure of subjectivity as well as the content of specific memories. Until we always keep, as it were, one foot in the past, we cannot, I believe, imagine the future or be in the present, in reality (Seigfried 1996, 198). Though in What Is Curriculum Theory? I remembered our collective history as a profession, the regressive moment is also individual, indeed, very personal. It is remembering who I am, may become, am now. For you, preparing to be a principal, I trust it means you will not forget you are a teacher, not a plant manager or CEO. Your obligation is not to the superintendent or to the school board-although you won’t want to signal that to either body-but to the profession, to your colleagues and to the children they teach. Without Liberty We Cannot Teach
Art, like the curriculum, is the process of becoming and re-creating in each situation. Patrick Slattery (2006, 254) Translation (without a master) is a vital concept and capacity to the project of creating an anti-violent curriculum.Susan Edgerton (1996, 53)
Though we may be imprisoned in an abusive relationship, a bad marriage in which we have little power, we, and the academic knowledge we teach, can help our children, our students, find their way out. That is why we must teach individual courses of our own making rather than following others’ directives in mass-produced textbooks linked to standardized exams. Our individual reconstructions of subject matter in conversation with our students constitute the prerequisite for teaching. Such curriculum is the expression of free indirect subjectivity. Unless we devise the curriculum we teach, we cannot demonstrate how academic knowledge enables understanding of the world. Academic knowledge can provide passages between the past and the future, between subjectivity and society, the local and the global. In knowledge, we can find freedom (Fabbri 1994, 82-83). Through the artistry of creative curriculum design, teachers can express their individuality and invite students to articulate theirs, through academic knowledge and inquiry (Williams 2007, 41; Seigfried 1996, 198). What Is Curriculum Theory? is, in one sense, an elongated syllabus, summarizing scholarship salient to understanding the nightmare that is the
present. It is a book composed as a course I teach. Not a book containing an airtight argument, it is a juxtaposition of readings, creating crevices wherein the reader can breathe. The emphasis upon autobiography provides a means by which you can reflect on yourself, including upon your gendered, racialized, and political positioning as a professional educator in society at this historical moment. As the individualized courses I am suggesting constitute the prerequisite for teaching, What Is Curriculum Theory? is a singular curriculum-standardization is the bane of education-which I would not necessarily expect another teacher to design.It is our individuality, I have long argued (Pinar and Grumet 2006 [1976]), that configures educational experience. Intellectual work is psychological labor. Rather than being “noise” in the system, undermining its efficiency, what we feel, how we think, our relations to others configure our curiosity, animate our interests, drive our desire to explore and discover. What we offer our students when we engage them in conversation are, as Susan Edgerton has explained, translations, not copies of sacred, originary texts (the masters’ words) but reconstructions of what others have studied in other times, in other places, for other purposes, for our time, this place, our purposes. Such translation constitutes the artistry of our profession, connecting subjectivity to society through academic knowledge, creating classrooms that are simultaneously civic squares and rooms of our own. In recreating each situation anew, as Patrick Slattery points out, we participate in a process of becoming, an educational process made immediate and vivid by our subjective presence in public. It is precisely our singular subjective presence politicians have persistently muted. Since the heyday of educational radio in the late 1920s (Pinar et al. 1995, 707), politicians have worked to supplement (if not replace) flesh-and-blood teachers with equipment. Equipment costs less, or so the myth of mass production goes. But education, unlike manufacturing, is not a business. However much politicians would like us to turn out “products” to be sold in the global market-place, however much some parents would like their children to be clones, in conformity with their “values” (as they rename their preferences and prejudices), our students, as we know, are not products but singular subjectivities. Anyone paying attention knows a child’s spirit-even when loved and nourished-is fragile and, finally, mysterious. The arrogance of trying to mold children after our ideas of what they should be fortunately fails, however often teachers are made to try. If parents-whose genetic and psychological material their children carry-can’t get their kids to honor curfew, how do they expect us to make geniuses out of them? We offer educational opportunities; students (and their parents) are responsible for taking advantage of them. We cannot guarantee outcomes. Each generation must find its own way. We can help.This is a conception of the teacher as a socially engaged artist-intellectual in complicated conversation not only with one’s students but with oneself, one’s subject, toward self-understanding and social reconstruction.7 This is a
conception in which the creativity and originality of the individual educator are key to the design of the curriculum. Maybe one doesn’t know, in advance, what one aspires to accomplish or how one will assess students’ study of what one teaches. Maybe one has only a hunch that juxtaposing the study of lynching to African American autobiographical practices to Cold War politics and school desegregation might enable students to understand the present political circumstances of their profession in ways they had not considered before, all the while introducing them to important bodies of scholarship, scholarship, one hopes, students will someday read in their original-not just summary-form. Such an apparent hodgepodge of topics may not a compelling argument make, but it becomes, one trusts, in the hands of a professional educator, a provocation to cultivate independence of mind (Nussbaum 1997, 19, 28).Academic-that is, intellectual-freedom (to speak the truth as you understand it through the courses one is employed to teach, courses that reflect one’s original and creative study of the subject as well as students’ responses to it) is the prerequisite for teaching. It is, however, one of those necessary but insufficient conditions for the practice of our profession. The material conditions in which we teach must also change. Salaries and working conditions vary dramatically across the United States and across and even within districts but, in general, doubling teachers’ salaries and cutting by half the number of classes and students they teach would improve working conditions considerably. Intellectual work can benefit from physical comfort and psychological stability (it should go without saying), neither of which is supported by the ongoing obsession with “what works.”8I suppose I am slipping into the progressive moment of the method of currere (otherwise known as fantasy of the future), where I will also imagine paid-at full salary, thank you-sabbaticals every five to seven years. Nor will I forget to provide each school with a teachers’ reading room, comfortably furnished with overstuffed chairs, good reading lamps, a library really, where teachers can read and think and nap, where they can be served coffee and snacks by a well-paid and respectful staff. Do you still want to be principals?That job would change, too. As Ted Aoki (Pinar and Irwin 2005) pointed out, the concept of principal used to mean the principal teacher. It was an honorary and, still in a few countries today, an elected position, reserved for the most respected members of the faculty who accept the burden of serving the faculty as its academic secretary and for a limited period of time, after which they return to the faculty. It is a position not modeled after businessmen but after teachers, themselves modeled after artists, scholars, and intellectuals, emphasizing creativity, originality, and individuality expressed through service to others. Dwayne Huebner (1999, 385) reminds us that “to administer is to minister to, to serve.” Working from a Christian tradition (after leaving Teachers College, Columbia University, he taught at Yale Divinity School), Huebner asks principals to think not in terms of organizations but of communities in open and candid conversation with themselves and their constituencies.
