The theory is based on the metaphor of the school as factory, which (after the Victorian doctrine of Progress) leads to the principle that schooling is subject to constant improvement. Most educational theorizing is a sibling to Norman Vincent Peale's Positive Thinking. A 50 year old comment on that is equally applicable to school theory. Peale had published a blurb from a pole vaulter who had utilized the power of positive thinking and thereby had won a competition A writer wondered what would have happened had all contestants followed suit Would the match have lasted forever as each positive thinker in turn surpassed the previous positive thinker. Early theories embodying this metaphor focused on learning theory and probably were on the whole harmless, even tending to humanize some of the more barbaric practices of the past. One result of the mythology of education, however, was probably damaging: the endless adding of other skills, knowledges, etc that the schools should offer. One cannot deny that each such addition was a good thing in itself, but the process fit in too well with the basic error of Progress, leading to a crisis of rising expectations of whart the schools should do and were not doing. (Example: the immense hullabaloo in the 1950s over "Why Johnny Can't Read." Joanna's worry aboaut the elimination of art education belongs to this additive approach to schooling: Keep adding Goodies. And of course that always produces the reverse: Go back to basics. This more is better leaks into 'higher' scholarship; the almost-always highly sensible Jim Farmelant slipped during the West fit of squalling on this list: Muy oh my: West had produced ONLY two solid books of scholarship in his field. Horrors. We need at least a book every two years that evryone must read from each of the associate and full professors in every university in the nation, sure we do. Or the utter hysterics on this list over the abject failure of the academic machine to jam some mystical entity called "critical thinking" into the nurons and synapese of mroe than 2/5 of the widgets they churned out each year.
And kids still survive.
Carrol
On 6/3/2011 10:55 AM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> At 07:38 AM 6/3/2011, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> There was an English teacher in my HS who'd never heard of T.S. Eliot.
>
>
> Does that make you feel a little better about the school search for
> the little one? You ended up studying English right?
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