[lbo-talk] Banking Model of Education (Re; Japanese students can't place N.Korea)

[louis kontos]

I don't support the idea of more testing anywhere, since too many  
courses at all levels are already designed around tests and nothing  
else. I never use the language of 'standards' unless tied to specific  
programs, policies, etc., because there is no such thing as a neutral  
context for a discussion of anything called standards -- also, it lends  
itself to too much confusion, since the right has effectively co-opted  
the term. same with terms like 'classics', 'the canon', etc. But I do  
think that its perverse that people should have to sit in school for 12  
or 14 years for jobs in which their education proves irrelevant (e.g.  
where they can be 'trained' in a few weeks to do whatever the job  
requires). Most of the students I've encountered tend to agree. When I  
ask in my classes, for instance, how many would be at a university if  
they could start a job now at 30k plus benefits plus some assurance  
that they would be able to keep that job for ten years (i.e., the same  
bad scenario available to most of us decades ago), usually  more than  
half say they would take the job over the education. University  
administrators seem to understand this dilemma, i.e., that most of  
their students would rather be elsewhere, which is why they make  
decisions in anticipation of higher enrollments during the onset of  
economic recession, i.e., when more workers become students. If   
education were free (or close to it) and if the ordinary student (not  
the privileged few, for whom the situation remains unchanged over  
decades of education reform polemics and policy initiatives), I would  
be able to celebrate the fact that more of us are now 'educated'. As  
for Freire, most high school teachers and university professors that  
I've spoken with don't seem to know him. Students in the dept. of  
education at my university read 'about' him (also they read 'about'  
Dewey, James, and other less controversial figures). In other words,  
they're not even given original sources and not taught much of anything  
besides making lesson plans (the university now has its equivalent --  
format designed by publishing companies -- for every undergraduate  
course). Yet they all seem to know cliches about methods --  
'dialogical', 'student centered', 'experienced based', etc. -- and know  
how to apply them to describe and justify what they do; namely, a lot  
of nothing. It seems to me that there was a unique moment in the  
history of this country, after WWII, when ordinary people had access to  
the kind of education previously reserved for the privileged few,  
brought real demands to the table, and forced reach change, became of  
force of democratization. It's not a coincidence that, according to  
public opinion surveys, Americans were most informed about social  
issues in the 60s (the tipping point was 1967). Now the average  
'educated' American knows so little about the world around him/her that  
a better discussion of history, politics, economics etc. can be had  
with a teenager in Palestine, or Germany, or Nicaragua. Freire was  
right, in my view, to assert as a goal of education the ability (and  
right) to 'name the world'. Why now (and why here) all the apologetics  
over a dismal situation?

On Mar 5, 2005, at 11:56 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> yellek oudeis at gmail.com, Fri Mar 4 15:52:42 PST 2005:
>> WRT the conversation about generational decline. I like the way Louis  
>> Kontos put it, since the idea that schools are nothing more than  
>> warehouses was put forth by Bowles and Gintis many moons ago. Schools  
>> were bad and getting worse.
>
> I'm sure that you, Louis, and Doug would agree with me if I say that  
> there is no "Social Security crisis" and that crisis-mongering is  
> merely the power elite's tactic for privatizing it or cutting its  
> benefits or both.  It's a shame that you don't agree with me when I  
> say there is no educational decline, even though the story of decline  
> is used in a similar way by the power elite -- in this case, for  
> instance, to sell the policy of subjecting teachers and students to  
> more meaningless tests, allegedly to restore the fallen standards. Why  
> smart people -- all presumably functioning at Adult Literacy Survey  
> Level 4 or above -- buy the myth that goes against their interests is  
> an interesting question.
>
> yellek oudeis at gmail.com, Fri Mar 4 15:52:42 PST 2005:
>> Although, I'm more curious to hear from Matt (and anyone else) about  
>> what teachers should do to make things more exciting.
> <snip>
>> http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20050223/od_uk_nm/ 
>> oukoe_odd_japan_korea_north
>> Japanese students can't place N.Korea
>> Wed Feb 23, 3:08 AM ET
>> TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) has menaced Japan  
>> with missiles, kidnapped its citizens and stands between it and a  
>> place in the soccer World Cup finals, but one in four Japanese  
>> high-school students can't place the country on a map.
>
> Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com, Fri Mar 4 16:03:33 PST 2005:
>> Actually that doesn't sound too bad, since you have to be at the 90th  
>> percentile of US high school seniors to locate the Mississippi River  
>> & the Rockies on an unlabeled map  
>> <http://nces.ed.gov/pubs97/web/97579.asp>
>
> Being asked to locate countries, rivers, and mountains on an unlabeled  
> map sounds like an activity essential to the banking model of  
> education that Paolo Freire criticized in _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_:  
> students accumulate information in their mental banks -- information  
> that is deposited by teachers, rather than sought for by students --  
> and then get tested on whether they can retrieve the deposited  
> information quickly and accurately.  Neither an ability to do well on  
> this model, nor an inability to do so, says anything about students  
> and their intellectual capacity.
>
> [Questions that go beyond identification are no better -- e.g.:
>
> 7. Look at the maps on page 74 of the atlas. Based on the maps and  
> your knowledge of the region, which of the following was an important  
> economic activity affected by Israel's victory in the Six Day War in  
> 1967?
> A) Industrial output in the Gaza Strip
> B) Shipping on the Dead Sea
> C) Agricultural exports from the Sinai Peninsula
> D) Transport of goods through the Suez Canal
> <http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ITMRLS/qtab.asp>.]
>
> The way the media reports on the results of tests based on the banking  
> model turn them into a spectacle not unlike "Jay Walking" on _The  
> Tonight Show_ (cf.  
> <http://www.nbc.com/nbc/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/jaywalking/ 
> index.shtml>).
>
> Education could be a little more useful -- and perhaps even exciting  
> -- to working-class students if they are freed from the "Jay Walking"  
> school of gotcha tests and their teachers are liberated from having to  
> teach to tests.
>
> louis kontos louis.kontos at liu.edu, Fri Mar 4 15:18:02 PST 2005:
>> the fact that greater parts of the working class now have access to  
>> some form of secondary education is not, in my view, necessarily  
>> anything to celebrate; not when they're required to gain academic  
>> credentials to earn even a mediocre living; not when they incur huge  
>> debt in the  process;
>
> It sure would be earthshaking if high school graduates en massed  
> boycotted post-secondary education, on the grounds that it's way too  
> expensive and that they can already do jobs that ostensibly require  
> college degrees.  But they are not going to do that any time soon, so  
> our demand should be more state subsidies to schools, in exchange for  
> lower tuitions, and more grants to students in need, so that students  
> can go to college without falling into big debts or having to work too  
> many hours to study.
> -- 
> Yoshie
>
> * Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/>
> * Calendars of Events in Columbus:  
> <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>,  
> <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
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