GoodSpin: The Basic Rules of Public School Hyperbole

edited 8/16/18

The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. -- Groucho Marx

Because public educators must deal not only with their students and colleagues, but also with parents, reporters and assorted busy-bodies, in other words, with the wishful thinking, the ill-informed and the near-delusional, they, the educators, tend to adapt that maxim so eloquently articulated by Thumper's mother in the movie, Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say it at all." In the name of motivation, tact or good publicity, we become casual liars.

There is, in addition, an aspect of advertising culture that has been picked up by the hyperbolists of American public education: the reversal rule, parts A and B

The Reversal Rule, part A is this: if it's true but unpleasant, treat it as false. Better yet, don't even mention it.

The Reversal Rule, part B: if it's false but pleasant, say it anyway.

Thus rather than recognize the ancient maxim, "Impossibility negates obligation," we are encumbered with "All children can learn!" or "No child left behind!" The santimoniousness of this blather is supposed to make us forget, perhaps, that the concerned public servants who have foisted off over-exacting special education legislation on the schools are the very ones who have reneged on their promises for adequate resources.

To examine these issues further, see What Works? Under What Conditions? And Who Really Cares?


Cordially,
-- EGR

Are Students a Teacher’s Clients?

updated 2/3/21

“You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil.”-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Our advertising-saturated culture invariably slops over into education. Houses are offered for sale as "homes"; amusement parks as "great adventures"; life insurance as "protection."

Some suggest that a student should be thought of as a "client." Perhaps what is at work here is the thought that people who deal with clients are more "professional," more worthy of respect, than those who deal merely with customers, wards, dependents, charges, inmates, or students.

Is reconceptualizing student as client just harmless ego bolstering for the practitioners of our traditionally underprized occupation? I think not. Students are not their teachers' clients. Nor should we aspire to our students' someday achieving such a relationship with us. Client is a term both too pompous and too shallow to characterize the special relationship that under the best of conditions exists between teacher and student.

No teacher gains an increment in prestige by referring to his or her students as clients. That deep commitment to (one might say, "obsession with") students' well-being found in many, many teachers -- a commitment that leads them to spend energy, time, and money far in excess of any compensation they could hope for -- is miserably served by the characterization of the student as "client."


To examine these issues further, see The Student as "Client"

-- EGR

What Works in Schooling: the “Newfanglers” versus the “Oldfashioned.”

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority. -- Henri Poincare

After a century or more of fiddling with schools and the kids in them, it should be apparent to anyone who can fog a mirror that there is not even a will-o’-the-wisp of a new method for teaching everyone, everything, everytime, everywhere, as is often “mandated” by federal, state and local school authorities. The “newfanglers” who populate our educational research institutes are much more adept at promoting their careers than student learning.

This is not to say that there is some "good old fashioned" method that works best, either. Time magazine recently featured the dicta of yet another befuddled educator: “what works best is a good teacher with a chalkboard and a class of willing students.”

This is mere rhetoric: it is like saying that health will be achieved by eradicating sickness; or, strength, by overcoming weakness. Such buffoonery is not uncommon in many areas of our public discourse.

Since our Home of the Free and Land of the Brave purports to be democratic, equal “respect” is accorded all opinions, from the least informed, most prejudiced to those most carefully considered. So it is that, to avoid a suspiciously “elitist” complexity, our public discourse, even among the technically skilled, tends towards vacuous hyperbole.

Thus, we Sons and Daughters of Liberty, lacking the means to even identify, much less achieve, ill-advised or unclear school goals, persist in trying to fix schools that either aren't broken, or which can't be fixed.

To follow this train of thought further, see What Works? Under What Conditions? And Who Really Cares?
-- EGR

“Cat” is NOT a Cat. “Reform” is NOT a Reform.

"The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; … -– S.I. Hayakawa (1949)

We live in a society where a “Going Out of Business Sale” sign on a store probably doesn’t mean that the store is going out of business after the sale is over. “Reality” shows on TV are far from reality, the confections of TV writers and producers. Brand names, too, are not infrequently assurances of quality that is non-existent.

Even our schools promote their own form of BS -- think only of the all-too-vagrant usage of such words as “challenged,” “basics,” “excellence,” “diversity,” “needs,” and “standards.” Unfortunately, BS, like other forms of S, can be infectious: it can produce a mind-set that borders on pathology.

Sean Cavanagh in an article, “In War of Words, 'Reform' a Potent Weapon,” (Education Week, 3/2/11) writes

A set of stock phrases, sound bites, and buzzwords has come to dominate the public discourse on education, summoned reflexively, it often seems, by elected officials and advocates who speak a shared, accepted language.

In other words, Big-Wig BS: on such rests the fate of our school populations.

To propose what you call a “reform” is to do two things:

a. it is to propose a change; and
b. it is to recommend that change as desirable.

Here is where the fight begins.

Not every possible change will be seen as a change for the better. Death is a change. It is not a reform. It is because people disagree on what is desirable that the controversy about school reform exists.

To examine these issues further, see The Need for and Possibilities of Educational Reform


Cordially
--- EGR