The turtle hypodermic of sickenpods: liberal studies in the corporate age

"In other, more enlightened countries, where teachers are happy and students are literate, the number of bureaucrats administering the educational system is less than one percent of the number employed here - and here, as David Solway points out, those bureaucrats are not administering the system but betraying it. "Turtle hypodermic of sickenpods" is a malapropism, an exuberant play on words, produced by one of David Solway's students to describe this "total epidemic of psychopaths"--Or bureaucrats. It's a flash of whimsy that slips past the spell-check but has no place in today's classrooms." "For our schools have become companies - education companies - complete with downsizing and cost-benefit analyses, where students are, as defined in a recent pedagogical bulletin, "client" and teachers "people who intervene" in the educational process. The curriculum is now a step-by-step procedure in which everything must be measured - and only those things that can be measured are valued - and mechanically "solved": analysis of War and Peace obligingly conforms to the ten steps of changing a flat tire. Improvisation, imagination, flexibility, surprise, delight - elements which, as Solway argues, comprise the essence of both learning and teaching, are ironed out by perpetual assessment and rigid routine." "While political leaders and corporate CEOS, focusing as usual on the quarterly return, call for "workers for the new economy," their educational reforms are producing just that: students with a grab-bag of minor skills and competencies and minds that are sadly uneventful, incapable of genuine intellectual achievement and lacking any sense of continuity with the historical and cultural traditions of our society. Their world is small, bleak, and limited; their world will become ours." "David Solway describes the betrayal of the ancient covenant between teacher and student, the loss of passion on one side, and eagerness on the other, to the detriment of us all."--Jacket A dominant theme that pervades this collection is the status of "theory" in the educational system. Solway claims that nothing of genuine and productive import comes out of theories. The manifold problems that bedevil the academy cannot be solved, or even rectified, by the usual onslaught of dogmas, reforms, and pseudo-revolutionary postulates that are produced in the misguided attempt to find the single, perfect, pedagogical system. Instead, we must embark on a stringent re-examination of the principles and assumptions on which our culture itself is predicated as reflected in contemporary practice. To do this, we need to develop an accurate killer heuristic to identify and monitor threats to our vocational well-being and effectiveness. This requires courage, a horror of sentimental credulity, and a willingness to learn from those in the educational trenches: the reference librarian should be questioned about the fate of the book, not the academic dean who has seldom read one; the teacher who has weathered innumerable classes should be heard, not the personnel director who is rarely in the building; the department secretary who is about to lose her job should be heeded while a jaundiced eye is turned on the omnipresent school coordinator. In almost every case, Solway believes those who deal directly with students will tell you the truth about what is happening to education while administrators will shuffle and mislead. The essays here are based on information from the trenches as well as from a significant minority of writers on educational and cultural themes. The Turtle Hypodermic of Sickenpods will be must reading for anyone interested in the fate of students and the education system. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Preface 12 Introduction: Theory, Reform, Administration, Technology, or The Four Horsemen of the Educational Apocalypse 18 1 Outcomes Based Pedagogy, or Cloning the Xenopus Generation 28 2 The Program Approach, or On the Road to Bartertown 63 3 Phaedrian Elegies, or Bazooka Joe's Pencil 103 Epilogue 129 Appendices 152 Notes 180 References 202