subtext

I am sitting in the hall of my school, monitoring student movement while the students are taking the TAKS test. Since I started teaching 18 years ago, one form or another of high stakes testing has been predominate in the Texas schools. From the start I have been troubled by the test. My first year of teaching I had to stop the kind of writing my students were producing, creative explosions of language, to teach formulaic essay patterns that would score high enough to pass the TEAMS. My students’ writing decayed. “By structuring classwork around exams rather than around dialogue between teachers and students, both became coparticipants in a simulacrum of learning that never required them to actively engage content or their own relationship to it; more important was “the ritual of seeming to deal with the topic” (McNeil 1986: 175 as cited in Luykx 1999, p. 182). One of the multitude of problems I have with the school system in which I am a part is the increasing emphasis on state mandated testing, the “skills” the students are supposed to be learning, which the test is supposed to be testing, become secondary to learning how to take the test. It is not just teaching to the test, but teaching of the test.
Yet, if one goes along with Luykx, the school is not necessarily a place where students learn to think or become adept in a given topic, but rather school is a locale where students are transformed into conforming citizens. Everything from the way teachers speak with the students to the structure of the curriculum lends itself to the reproduction of the goals and privileges of the hegemonic elite.
Not that this is all that new; Dewey in “Democracy and Education” viewed school as the main socializing instrument. However, a part of becoming a part of society is to create citizens who think and act the same. In order for this to occur much of what is seen as veering from the norm has to be oppressed; the school is the ideal location for this oppression to be taught. Luykx describes the school system in Bolivia, but as I read the book I kept having to remind myself that she was not conducting her ethnography in the U.S. “Bolivia’s public schools have accomplished their implicit social mission, if not always their stated pedagogical one” (Luykx 1999, p. 51). The implicit social mission is to maintain the status quo, although “the myth of schooling” is that the more school you have is directly related to economic benefits, in reality much of what occurs in the school contributes to the continued oppression of minorities and “others” who do not fit into the dominant hegemonic power structure. “Restricting access to education (or limiting it to the primary grades) is one of the most efficient ways of assuring this distribution of labor) (Luykx 1999, p. 51). In Bolivia Luykx pointed out the social differences in urban and rural students, I saw it as correlated to the increasing stratification by “ability’ groups in the U.S. The social structure of white dominance is reinforced by the de facto tracking of students into “regular” and “Advanced Placement” strands. While portrayed as open admission where students choose to take the AP classes, when one looks at the ethnic make-up of the classes the regular classes have a much higher percentage of African-american and Hispanic students when compared to the AP classes. Thus reinforcing the ideological and social control of the ruling elite.
While I found “The Citizen Factory” to be fascinating and pertinent to the concept of figured worlds and to schooling in general, it was also depressing. I am not sure that real change can occur. While I have a strong belief in the romantic idea that education is the mark of a free person, I also see the insidious control that the school exerts on society. It is a problem that has bothered me for several years now: how to be apart from and a part of society simultaneously. I guess that is why I am still in school: I am looking for a shape to assume.