What would Kafka say about American education in the current era? That is our question for the evening. I just started the introductory material on an edition of the Metamorphosis and other stories, and as I read it, I started to understand what the writer meant by the universality of his major theme.
As any good reader of Wikipedia can discover, Kafka explored the notion of alienation. Alienation from the self, from the world, from all of it- whatever it is. However, built into any good look at Kafka is a bit of Marx and a sprinkling of Nietzsche, who Kafka read early on.
By the way, did you know that Kafka's sister divorced her Aryan husband so that she could be taken into custody with her other sisters by the Nazis and died in Auschvitz? Remarkable.
So, as I muse on Kafka, I think to myself, education has become, in Marxist terms, an assembly line of production. As a worker on the assembly line, I no longer have any ownership of the product. My worth is calculated based on how much value I add to my product. It is no longer valuable for a teacher to enlighten, to inspire, etc. It is nice if he does this, but not valuable. The only thing valuable any more is to add value to the commodity we call the cohort of students we process through the machine. Of course, the value is determined in any number of ways. If I can demonstrate that my students improved in some measurable way over the course of study, I can demonstrate added value. By reducing students to conglomerate sets of scores and by reducing their humanity to aggregated data, the process of education becomes far less complicated, and much more in line with corporate models of success.
There are a handful of companies out there who actually want their employees to become more creative for the sake of creativity. The bottom line is... well.... the bottom line. Creativity takes only a secondary or perhaps tertiary role in the process. The goal is not creation, the goal is added value. If being creative leads to a better bottom line, then creativity is fine. If it doesn't lead to improved test scores on a standardized test, the enlightenment thing is just a... mental state.
Now, granted, the current push for 21rst century skills gives lip service to creativity. It may even be one of our 'four cs' along with collaboration and competence. But the ability to come up with creative solutions to complex problems is now a skill. Creativity is not a goal, but a means to an end. In other words, the creativity itself is valued only if it leads to something of substance, a measurable outcome.
What can we expect, right? Who pays for enlightenment? We want results. If I hand you a paycheck with numbers on it, I want a report back that has numbers on it. Of course the absurdity of it is that we create these standardized tests that attach a number to a person's competence in a field of study, but we all know that the number is a merely a sign, a metaphor for something else.
Just as IQ tests create a numerical symbol for an elusive thing we call intelligence, standardized tests are really parables for the real thing. If I get an A in Mr. Fairchild's class, what does that mean? If I get a 98 on the ELA, what does that mean? Frankly both can be compared to ratings on wines....
We need to know many things to interpret these letter and number symbols. The A in my class represents many things. For some students, it represents their best effort. For others it represents something less than their best, but compared to the others in the class, it is excellent. Does the A represent how much the student learned, or does it represent how much the student handed in? Usually the latter. Does an A in a Regents class mean the same as an A in an Honors class?
The 98 on the ELA represents any number of things. First, one must know what year the student took the exam. For it to have meaning, one must know how that student did in relation to other students who took the test. If the test was scored out using a typical bell curve, that student should be in fairly rarefied air. However, this is really up to the state and how they decide to curve or distribute the scores. They will play with "cut scores" and crunch numbers to fit whatever they feel is appropriate, but all of it will come down to a corporate goal and all individual variables will be subsumed for the larger goal of the whole body.
This is the absurd moment. One suddenly realizes that the grades one has gotten, the acolades one has received, the pats on the back for a job well done, are all arbitrary and meaningless. This is the Kafka moment. When our main man wakes up to the nightmare that he is not a human, but a vermin.... The absurdity of the moment becomes unbearable.
The system does not want us to see this absurdity. It wants us to remain comfortably numb in our comfortably modern understanding of statistics and justified results. By way of these artificial signs of success, the funding continues, and the system coughs back to life on the way to whereever it is going.
Like I said, creativity is nice in this system, as long as it can be measured and calibrated.
No comments:
Post a Comment