Introduction

Standards, Double Standards 

& the Ideals of Education

From the standpoint of the socio-cultural construction of reality, the function of formal educational institutions in state societies is the transmission of knowledge and the reproduction of the institutional forms and associated behaviors necessary to the perpetuation of the system. A part of that function is to provide symbolic legitimization, integration and socialization-enculturation of culturally shared experiences that are consonant with the governing ethos of such systems. 

This structural function of education is subject to shifting goals, frameworks and ideals as the product of structural and social changes that occur within the host society. This is especially true under circumstances in which change is very rapid, due to acculturative modernization, development, and, in countries like the US, globalization and rapid demographic increase and fluctuation.

The stress of this dynamic change follows as well increasing systemic integration at all levels, as well as shifting structural frameworks that are the result of stratification, opportunity structures and resource distribution networks. This patterning of systemic development continues inexorably in a corporate, superorganic sense. Within a strongly capitalist system such as the US, rising costs of education across the board are driving centralization, administrative bureaucratization and intrusion of financial management and profit-making interests throughout educational systems.

In the US, the crux and stress of these transformations is falling mainly upon the lone teacher in the self-contained classroom. The frequency of intrusions and interruptions in the classroom, on a daily, even hourly basis, has increased over the years, with the increase in the amount of administrative supervisorial authority and critical evaluation of teachers. The degree of independence of teachers to devise their own curriculum and teaching methods and to develop their own styles has been sharply curtailed as a consequence. The amount of time mandated for teachers to spend in testing and formal evaluation activities as well as an increasing number of extraneous administrative and cross-cutting social commitments has compromised critically, if not completely jeopardized, the teacher's capacity to effectively work with individual students in a differentiated and consistent manner to achieve long term developmental results.

At the same time, larger social and ethnocultural issues that lie behind many of the transformations of educational systems nationwide are consistently ignored and not taken into account in policy planning except under rhetorical rubrics like "diversity" and multi-cultural themes and lesson plans. So great has been this refusal to face the larger social realities in which educational policy and systems are embedded that it amounts to a conspiracy of neglect and failure of government to up hold the interests of the people they are designed to serve first and foremost.

Teachers today across the United States are living in trying times. Educational bureaucracy has grown with increasing centralization of redistribution structures and increasing costs of education. Political and economic interests have come together in a sophisticated understanding that education can be manipulated as a tool for social policy and promotion of private interest. This comes as a consequence of the closing of the American social system concomitant to its stratification and processes of globalization. As the Federal government gains a heavier hand in the funding and articulation of educational institutions across the nation, the requirement and growth of bureaucratic control structures, often parasitical to the ultimate ends of educating children, is expected to follow suit as a simple matter of course.

These changes can in a sense be considered the natural consequences in a general shift in American society and its social structure away from a democratic, rights-based and contract-oriented system toward an increasingly closed, "republican" and interest-based system. Educational systems, after all is said and done, reflect the structural ethos and patterning of the society and culture that it is bound within and serves.

A so-called "climate of accountability" is foisting upon teachers in their classrooms control structures and agendas that are not of their own making, and often not to their own liking. This climate of accountability reflects ultimately the implicitly coercive constraints of a culture of correctness that demands of teachers uncomplaining behavioral conformity to plans and policies not of their own design. This has been done in the name of standards that often appear arbitrary and unrealistic to the needs of the individual student or to the spectrum of ethnocultural backgrounds represented in different classroom contexts. 

At the same time, there appears to be almost no accountability for higher level administrators and government agencies that are involved directly or indirectly with policy in education. In spite of the logical and obvious drawbacks to an overemphasis upon testing, tracking and the consequences of testing, examination systems have been promoted with the help of major publishing companies to the extent that they are seen typically by teachers as interfering with normal curriculum instruction and intruding heavily upon the teacher's time in relation to one's students. All of this speaks in terms of general systems of "hyper-coherence" and meddling of administrative control structures in the politics of the classroom, and this has been a trend that does not necessarily lead to improved results in terms of enhancement of the average student's academic success.

Undeniable biases and patterns of discrimination have developed in the articulation of the American system at every level, and the fundamental role of education seems as a consequence to have shifted away from that of being a clearing house and marketplace for the free exchange of ideas and for social mobility in an open and democratically based society, to that of being a gate-keeping instrumentality of an increasingly class polarized and differentiated society that serves the interests of the promulgation of social correctness and a structural status quo of the system.

In other words, one should no longer expect campus protests or riots or even any radical student organizations genuinely questioning authority except those in favor of the brave new status quo, organized from above by elite interests. Students and professors these days are too strapped by the system, paying off credit cards and hustling to pass examinations and pay tuition and student loans, to worry or seriously be concerned with making the world a better place. And this is how the leaders of our society, or rather those who are in control of jobs, purse-strings, and the mechanisms for academic legitimization and advancement, want it.

How much of this transformation has been deliberate, and how much of it has come about as the result of unintended consequences of the best made plans, remains an unanswerable and mostly moot point. I have born witness in fact to the transformations of the American educational system for almost my entire life, and from many different points of view. Without a doubt many policies adopted in the early 1980's were intentional and well planned out in advance, but many other reforms and changes have come about piece meal and as a response to unplanned social problems in the wake of many of the educational reform policies promulgated earlier.

Education today seems to have been an historical and cultural by-product of a diverse range of forces and influences. It has been made to bend and to some extent yield to overwhelming population pressures and radically shifting demographic patterns over the last twenty years especially. It has commanded one of the largest sectors of the domestic budgets in the nation on local, state and increasingly federal levels, and wherever there are big bucks, there is also and automatically big competition for control over resources and hence great potential for corruption and manipulation of these resources. Educational loop-holes have developed that have edged basic educational law and foundations in our society.

I am not attempting to write a conspiracy theory over the downfall of education in America. I attempt to take a critical but balanced anthropological approach to the central issues that predominate in education today. People do not realize that a good anthropologist, by training and perhaps disposition, seeks to get the whole story, and always looks for the background low-down rather than focusing only upon what is received wisdom or common knowledge. Common knowledge increasingly has become the popular construction of a jaundiced media and the dissemination of ideological doctrine and Big Brother-like or "sponsored" diatribe that has its ultimate source at the center of state power and the service of conservative, elite and private interests. There is therefore an important anthropological difference between looking at things in an idealistic or ideological manner, as the way things should be (but rarely if ever are) and the way things really are (but rarely if ever should be). Anthropology, even educational anthropology, is a science first and foremost concerned with reality, and even the reality of official state ideology and the constraints of correct culture.

I do not see the trajectory that American society has taken in the last twenty-two years especially to be that of a top-down conspiracy, though there have been elements of this most certainly. I see it as rather a kind of Grand Illusion, a collusion of cultural and social interests that included most importantly the American consumer and the average American citizen. The American people indirectly consented and allowed to happen, whether because they were lulled into a sense of sleepy or wishful complacency that the whole world was made just for their taking, or because the overvaluing of competition at the expense of consolidation and government sponsored cooperation and sanctioning led to these kinds of detrimental consequences.

I do not think that Capitalism by itself is to blame--it is a restless and hedonistic animal that serves only its own greedy interests at any social cost. If the government cannot serve the collective interests of the American public by policing and reigning in the liberties of Big Business by means of effectively enforcing laws and regulations, then it is almost certain, and a true history, that those capitalist interests will not police themselves and will almost certainly seek to take full advantage of an economically favorable situation. Government leaders at all levels should ask themselves what is their primary responsibility, to whom do they serve first, and what their primary function is in maintaining order and justice in society, even at the expense of promotion of big business.

There is an entire generation of post baby boom Americans who have been the true victims of this kind of progress, as they have had to sacrifice to a great extent their full participation in the American pie in order that many others, often non-citizens, can get a share in the system as well. They have been sacrificed at the alter of ungoverned and rampant socio-economic development in the name of modernization and progress. They have seen their dreams and their potential lives short-changed and systematically sold-out, and the American government has not only allowed this to happen, but has actually been the main promoter of its occurrence.

Liberal and open education was traditionally conceived and instituted as the basis for a strong, informed democratic society. Public education was made mandatory, or compulsory, for these reasons. It can be effectively said these days that education is no longer, strictly speaking, compulsory. Parents can nowadays, and often do, yank their kids out of schools at the mere drop of an undesirable teacher's hairpin. Religious organizations have been attempting very aggressively (and some would say regressively) once again to mix secular and non-secular interests in education, in defiance of the basic doctrine of the separation of church and state which underlies basic freedoms of religion in a secular state.

Whatever else education may or may have become in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it has certain become increasingly didactic and "correct" in its received version of the worldview and world it seeks to inculcate and transmit to the younger generation. Parents, teachers, administrators and increasingly politicians and academic book and test publishers will argue, sometimes vehemently, whether this is a good or bad thing, but it will continue to happen in a progressive manner nonetheless.

The predominant model adopted by the American educational system is one that has been critically influenced and dominated by capitalist and business ethos and management behavior, and by increasingly top-down and ultimately arbitrary control over the articulation and directions that education in the classroom, at all levels will take. The educational system is being used as a proxy for state policy, and this includes among other things the radical acculturative transformation and modernization of American society at any and all social costs. The consequences and contradictions of these transformations are being played out in the classrooms as the central forum for their articulation.

The prospects of the future in American education are unfortunately not bright. Surging and now uncontrolled population growth as the result of these policies is swamping the classroom and the schools, and the resources that trickle, down in decreasing doses to the local school are sure to become further restricted due to nation-wide budget deficits in all the states and by a gradually but exponentially growing rate of inflation of costs.

Campuses across the country are swamped by new students who sit in cattle classes and pay their mounting student debts with credit cards, and the schools now make it a deliberate statement of policy that there is no guarantee or implicit promise (read prospect) of employment beyond the degrees they are seeking. These growing student debts are continuing to be used for the financing of major, often grandiose construction projects with large cost over-runs on crowded campuses that look less and less green each passing year. This was a trend that clearly started with Reaganomics in 1980, and continues until now under the second Bush administration. There are masses of young students who have little real opportunity or chance in the future for an equal piece of the seemingly infinite American pie, at the same time there are other privileged groups of students of the same age who are light-years ahead of their poorer compeers in educational standards and resources.

We bear witness to the massive and as yet still unaddressed social problem of the displaced and appropriated commons due to the inexorable demands for globalization and unlimited capitalist economic development. The educational system is tethered to the purse strings of the host society, and must therefore follow suit in the directions that this larger society has taken. The history of this pattern of development has been undeniable, unless of course we want to rewrite and revise our history to suit our received point of view.

Though no one can really predict the future, it is my professional opinion at this time that the American educational system will further shift from a public-centered to a private and government centered model, a shift made virtually certain by the upholding of the voucher system. As an indirect but inevitable consequence, the capacity, power and role and professional identity and job security of the public school teacher and their academic professorial counterpart will diminish and become increasingly restrictive. The American educational system, at one time by far the best educational system in the world, will have its neck laid bare on the chopping block of world capitalization and globalization.

As long as the American style of development and globalization is advanced at all costs, the general ability for the American educational system to meet the rising social needs of an increasing and increasing ethnicized American population will continue to be further jeopardized and compromised. As a public institution and a basic cornerstone of an informed democratic society capable of its own leadership, its back will eventually be broken. It can be expected that privatization of educational institutions will follow in due course in the way that privatization of the medical system occurred in the 1980's under the guise of HMOs. We all know and live with that "success" story today. Teachers' unions now remain a social bulwark and defense against these inexorable processes, but even the unions and their authority are being slowly chipped away by the importation of foreign teachers, the circumventing of credentialing procedures, and in the mass production of new teachers to glut the educational job market.

Teachers are in a sense their own worst enemies in this game to manipulate the resources that they represent and articulate in social life. As long as they are bound to their own sense of ideological false consciousness about the system they serve, and their own professional identity within it, it can be expected that little real resistance or effort towards positive reform will be given to the continuing transformation of the American educational system in the 21st Century. This ideological illusion is rooted to the naive notion that there is no corruption in the United States, and that as a human system we are not subject to the same foibles or kinds of weaknesses that other human systems in the world are naturally prone to. It is an ideological delusion that admits of no contradiction in human systems, and denies the possibility of double standards that operate often behind closed doors. An implicit culture of correctness reinforces this culture of denial, as to raise protest or to voice a complaint about the unfairness of the system, about administrative arbitrariness that as often as not works beyond legal frameworks and guidelines without being held accountable, is to risk not only marginalization but ostracism from one's profession. This blindness tends to confer unquestioning and uncritical credulity upon the communications media and is reinforced by a Chevy compact-car culture focused around cheap holidays and chain restaurants. As a consequence, the expectation is that the educational system in its entirety will become increasingly merely an object of administrative manipulation and control.

I have found little of a critical or questioning attitude or disposition among teachers to their own work or professional identity that was commonplace and accepted, even expected, among anthropologists. I would say that the teaching profession is largely culturally inbound, even in purportedly "multi-cultural" and diversified contexts. The transparency and invisibility of cultural values that inform American education and define ethnocentric boundaries around its conceptualization, worldview and daily praxis, has proven at times trying if not difficult for an anthropologist to accept.

At the same time, I believe pedagogical aspects of teaching have largely been deemphasized from the standpoint of the professionalization of the average teacher, largely as a consequence of the "bottling" of educational curriculum in scaffolded and standardized texts and teaching systems. The lack of differentiation and specialization of knowledge of subject areas, or of world knowledge in general, reflects a general trend in American society away from classical literacy skills and knowledge/skill competence. This trend is reflected by the shifting interests and values of parents and their children who enter the classroom, with a preoccupation for sports, social involvements, electronic literacy and the communications media, and a general neglect and devaluation of homework, reading, and the use of the local library.

At the same time, I have found a tremendous degree of professionalism by many teachers, in relation to their own classes, schools and students, if not to the profession of education as a whole. They take their jobs seriously, and for the most part are responsible on a daily basis to the interests and welfare of their charges. By and large the professional experience and expertise that develops in relation to student and classroom management, teaching techniques at various levels and in varying contexts and circumstances, along with a rapport and insight into child personality and variability, is consistently ignored and overlooked in factoring grand educational equations. So called "experts" and consultants with PhD, administrative backing, and large ego's tend to be called in at enormous expense to give direction to teachers who are then treated as if their experience and expertise does not count.

All in all, we must ask what are the ideals of education, not only in comparatively wealthy countries like the US and Great Britain, with long-standing histories of democratic reform. Have these ideals been lost, or have they shifted a little to the capitalist right or the socialist left? Have they changed significantly from what they were in the first place, if at all? What in fact were the ideals of public education in the first place?

On some levels, these ideals, sort of like the Hippocratic oath for medical professionals, defines an implicit code of conduct and professional ethos for all teachers to uphold, regardless of how well or how poorly such ideals may be realized in the larger system.

The ideal of education stems from a deep meta-ethical concern for what can be called the inherent and natural rights and responsibilities of humankind. This is a panhuman framework that holds equally, without double standards, for all human beings. We may say that education is the right of a child, of every child, to an enriched development and socialization as a normal human being and citizen of their respective societies. It is a right to be taught and to be provided the effective context for learning and development that is necessary to becoming a productive and successful citizen in life. That systems fall short of these ideals in many instances should not be left unsaid.  How we go about defining this set of rights for different individuals, groups and societies depends on a variety of issues, the most importance of which is probably the availability of the resources necessary to achieve these ideals in some realistic manner. As with all ethical dilemmas and human situations, this problem is not without paradox. At what point does the promotion of social equality through quota systems and communal based systems of discrimination via education come to interfere with and jeopardize the protection of the foundation of political equality that is the basis of a genuinely free and open society?

At the same time, we must ask, what are the concomitant set of educational responsibilities that naturally and logically cohere to the granting of pan-human educational rights? I would say for starters that the sphere of responsibilities in education begins and ends with the student for their own knowledge and behavior, and extends outward to embrace parents, families, schools and the larger communities that host and support these basic social institutions. It is the responsibility to do homework in a consistent and serious way, the responsibility to behave appropriately in classroom contexts. The responsibility for knowledge is inherent to the problem of knowledge. Knowledge creates responsibility, which, once gained, cannot be justly ignored. This is what marks the human species off as unique and special in the universe. It is an onerous sense of responsibility that we all share as human beings, regardless of whether we wish to shoulder such a burden or not. We can say in an enlightenment framework that what was once seen primarily or exclusively as "the White Man's burden" has become through globalization and global development and the natural process of civilization and acculturation, "Every Human's Burden" that we must all share and share alike.