Education policy as 'counter-insurgency'?

Andrew J. Bacevich reviews a recent book that examines, and deconstructs, the military strategy of counter-insurgency (in the Chronicle of Higher Education). He retells the key points made by the author (Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War).  Reading them, I was stuck by the analogy to education.  Perhaps inappropriate?  Perhaps, indeed.  Yet, let me elaborate.  Below are Bacevich's summary of the criticisms of COIN made by Porch. After each, I will explain the resonance to education.

• First, COIN is neo-imperialism in drag. The same "ethos of paternalism" that empire-builders once devised to justify their actions persists. What we have and represent is what they—Algerians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans—want and need. COIN ostensibly offers the means to make good on this invented obligation. Underlying "contemporary COIN as a hearts and minds, good governance, state-building exercise," Porch writes, is a tacit assumption that "non-Western societies exist in a time-warp which the adoption of Western practices ... will allow them to overcome."

Policy makers claim to speak for the goals and purposes of education. Rather than investigate the indigenous practices, norms and meanings that constitute effective teaching and learning that emerge in local communities and across campuses from the ground up, policy makers posit their own norms and meanings (and increasingly, mandated practices: see NCLB and RttT). Teachers exist in a time-warp to the policy makers, resisting advanced practices that will allow them to overcome the encrustations of bygone, failed systems.

• Second, this duty to liberate, civilize, or uplift provides a pretext to do the otherwise impermissible. "This small wars tradition," Porch writes, "views insurgents as beneath the respect accorded combatants by the laws of war." The bad guys are mere outlaws or criminals—in contemporary parlance, terrorists. As a consequence, Western soldiers engaged in small wars cite "the barbarous nature of their enemies" to exempt themselves "from the requirement to follow civilized standards of warfare." In practice, this provides a tacit authorization for torture, prisoner abuse, and collective punishment of local populations deemed insufficiently cooperative in helping to out the insurgents.

Convinced of the supremacy of their ideas, policy makers can view teachers as 'outlaws,' obstructionists in need of (at best) managing and (at worst) removal.  The 'laws of war' are changed: elimination of collective bargaining rights, teacher autonomy and local curricula. Punishment replaces reward.   Being a team player - 'cooperative' - matters (think of the influx of PLCs shaped by top-down agenda, rather than organic discussions about students and their needs).

• Third, peel back the grand claims, and there's remarkably little substance underneath. Counterinsurgency inverts Clausewitz. Rather than defining war as the continuation of politics, it employs violence as an excuse to avoid tough decisions, compensating for a "lack of a strategy with tactical solutions." COIN offers technique devoid of larger purpose, amounting to "a doctrine of escapism." What purports to be a thinking man's approach to war actually gives policy makers license to stop thinking.

The outcomes of education become test scores as measured by 'adequate yearly progress' and international comparions (TIMMS; PISA; NAEP; and soon, assessments on/for the Common Core curriculum). Rather than a means utilized by teachers to better help students learn, tests are the ends, and thus all work is subsumed to increasing achievement. The problem is that these tests are held up as representative of something larger then themselves - economic competitiveness, usually - for which there is zero evidence (nor any attempt to focus on what else impacts economic competitiveness in a global marketplace) that achievement on these tests significantly affects this larger purpose. Despite its low level of face validity (of course a more educated populace might perform better in many spheres of the global world), this policy lacks any significant substance.  It is just assumed to be valid

• Fourth, when put to the test, counterinsurgency doesn't work all that well. Even when nominally achieved, mission accomplishment exacts enormous costs. Solutions—the French "victory" in the Battle of Algiers is one example—tend to come unstuck. For this very reason, sustaining a COIN campaign finds supporters conjuring up some vast existential threat—monolithic communism or the prospect of a new caliphate controlled by rabid Islamists. Put another way, counterinsurgency stokes fantasies that undermine strategic realism.

We have been graduating more students, matriculating more students into college, increasing test scores  and IQ scores and generally accumulating a massive databank on successful pedagogies for at least a generation (especially since introduction of NCLB in 2002). And yet, the consequences indicate that, by the reformers' calculations, things are worse than ever. Thus, policy makers continue to gin up the existential threat of bad schooling to impose even more 'rigorous' standards and practices that extract enormous costs from communities (and get to beat upon teachers - see point 'Second' above).

• Finally, sooner or later, COIN-incubated chickens come home to roost, appearing as intrusive surveillance systems, militarized police forces, and profiling that categorizes certain citizens as "subversives because of their ethnicity or ideas." Porch also emphasizes counterinsurgency's corrosive impact on civil/military relations. COIN undermines military professionalism. Selling small wars converts officers into hucksters, with senior commanders subordinating truth-telling to the imperatives of public relations as they court politicians and curry favor with journalists. Worse, counterinsurgency campaigns that end badly foster resentment among soldiers who feel misused or stabbed in the back.

Scripted curricula; aggressive accountability measures; corrosive affects on teacher attitude and school climate, including erosion of collaboration (teachers working in merit pay context are incentivized not to share their best practices with others) and professionalism (cheating scandals); for profit companies sprout up to offer schools an assortment of materials that promise to maximize student gains, thus turning administrators into 'hucksters' for the sunk costs; and resentment, from teachers and communities aware of what is happening.

Bacevich ends with a prick on the military's new emphasis, like drone warfare and special ops militarism: "Together they provide not a basis for strategy, but a further excuse not to have one, even as they sustain illusions of kick-ass military supremacy."  I would argue that the reformers use of their current methods - COIN for Education - permits irresponsibility.  When means becomes the ends,  no need to consider just what school is for exists.

Inappropriate?  Please let me know.

What education is and is not

Philip Kitchner has a thoughtful point (in his NYTimes critique of Thomas Nagel): "Nagel’s 19th-century predecessors wondered how life could be characterized in physico-chemical terms. That particular wonder hasn’t been directly addressed by the extraordinary biological accomplishments of past decades. Rather, it’s been shown that they were posing the wrong question: don’t ask what life is (in your deepest Newtonian voice); consider the various activities in which living organisms engage and try to give a piecemeal understanding of those."

He adds some of Dewey's advice on how to go about understanding a world that lacks ultimate certainty: "First, philosophy and science don’t always answer the questions they pose — sometimes they get over them. Second, instead of asking what life and mind and value are, think about what living things and minds do, and what is going on in the human practices of valuing ... a kinder approach would be to talk about the ways in which various aspects of living things have been illuminated."

Let me repurpose, and rephrase, these claims for education more tersely:
There is no 'education' but many educations
Understanding them must not mean trying to unite them.
Answers often go on long past the questions that they address.
Description unveils more layers and levels of experience that prescription can.
Ask how we know we know what we know.
Start over.

Schools are ecology, full of social life, the life of the mind, public good emerging in collaborated life and the various of lives of students on full display of emotions and sentiment being earned from moment to moment. Education, writ large, is the holding frame of all this life.  It is not something that holds together form the outside, but rather makes sense as some 'thing' only in the retrospective; what has happened when all this life occurs, under what contexts, encompassing what intentions, motivations and desires?  That is education

Arguing for what is lost in online education (in a different op-ed, published on the same day),  Aaron Hirsh writes of that at best education, "... courses prompt and equip students to investigate the world, leading not merely to a diploma and a salary, but to a more engaged life — not just to a richer bank balance, but to a richer existence."

Schools, and classrooms, are engaged life.  As long as education requires only the demonstration of knowledge mastery and skill competency, a restricted, efficiency-focused, low resource schooling makes ideal sense. But then, the experience of being educated withdraws. All that life happens, untutored and un-applicable to these emergent lives.

Infinite

My mind wanders all the time tnow, even when trying to read.  I end up reading just for the sake of spending time.  I begin feel depressed, that I'm wasting my time.  Nothing gets done; I am neither successful nor acting pursuing anything I want to be successful at (at which I want to be successful).  I sink further into depression, for not being anyone, not doing anything and not being able to motivate towards something. Seconds and minutes and hours pass, simply of endurance, ticking down toward death

Then it hits me. Each second is not getting me closer to death. Yes; death is to come, and from now, that means that as time passes, I get closer to death.  But, we never know when death will come.  It could come ... now.  Or ... now.  Or even ... now.  And yet, it does not.  Death does not yet, has not yet come. Each second does not bring me closer to death.  Each second takes me away from a death that did not come. Time brings me no closer to the end. Rather, time, and the experience I have of living in time, grants me immortality away from death.  I do not need to be depressed because I am wasting my days, speeding off toward ultimate silence.

However, I am depressed that, freed from death, existing in the infinite that runs away from death, I still do not add much to the human condition.

Empathy and Neuro-political priming

Interesting line about the nexus of neuro-cognitive science and the current zeitgeist of social context: "My sense is that the most insidious, influential and largely unacknowledged of these belief systems is neoliberal capitalist ideology. That is, the critical missing piece in this lively and rapidly proliferating conversation about empathy is the failure to identify the dynamic convergence of of culture, politics and the brain, what the eminent political theorist William Connolly once describes as neuropolitics or the “politics through which cultural life mixes into the composition of the body/brain process. And vice versa.”"

Here is what sense I make on this. From roughly Reagan '80 onward, a shift in consciousness has taken place.  People are encouraged to think of themselves above all else (as in Thatcher's comment that society does not exist, only people do). Economic self-interest becomes the primary mode of self-recognition and effort (this essay from the LARoB partially explains the economics of the transition towards greedy self-aggrandizement as the height of achievement). Schools feed into this context by teaching forms of consumption (knowing more, being able to do more) and competition (knowing more than others; doing more than others) and meritocracy (the system is fair and neutral, therefore the winners deserve their gains).

Lee Siegel makes what I take to be a similar point in his essay from the WSJ on how humanities ruined the humanities (well, literature's own self-immolation): "So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies."

The background to engaged efforts to understand (of what Paulo Freire might have called conscientization) in our time engender instrumental applications for this learning.  Put another way, the more successfully critical thought is learned by students, the more adept they become at using the system to enrich their own life.

Can empathy be the antidote to the irrupting this contextual reality?  Can teaching students, and demanding of leaders in all institutions, a form of mindful consideration of the interconnection of all things, of the relatedness that our actions have on others and the suffering that others experience are part and parcel of our own lives matter?

Siegel again: "The literary classics are a haven for that part of us that broods over mortal bewilderments, over suffering and death and fleeting happiness. They are a refuge for our secret self that wishes to contemplate the precious singularity of our physical world, that seeks out the expression of feelings too prismatic for rational articulation. They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive ... Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read."

Empathy as the process of accept mystery, sitting with silence, withdrawing from the aggressive act of making sense and thus affixing function on life?  One can hope and act in pursuit of that hope.

NYTimes, David Desteno, on meditation

A short piece on the value of meditation, too shrift of good research discussion, earns a letter.

To the Editor;

In his fascinating study on the value of meditation ("The morality of meditation" July 6, 2013), David Desteno misses, for this educator, a more encouraging reason why his participants exhibited compassion: simply participating in the study made them more attuned to those around them.

Their compassion might not "... stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us," Rather, being part of a specific group - as members of in a study on meditation - may have induced the participants to engage with the world around, regardless of any consequence from their mindfulness work.

I try to encourage my students to embrace more fully in their social world as part of their training to become teachers.  It is hopeful to learn that simply by doing so, they may become more empathetic, and thus better serve their students.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

First in my summer reading is Cormac McCarthy's Blood meridian.  The book has one lasting virtue and one soft spot.

First the virtue.  McCarthy's writing is elegant throughout.  He never allows the violence to wane, always finding a lyricism in his language of agony and human destruction.  The narrative is bleak, hostile; at times, unrelenting gruesomeness. His skill is to normalize the ongoing misery experienced by most of the characters, without romanticizing it, nor diluting its effecting, arresting shock.  There are no heroes here, few protagonists, just characters who live through a series of deadly encounters. What makes the writing so evocative is McCarthy's ability to constant find seams of beauty in his descriptions.  As if he writes so as to explore and describe the levels of depravity, each scene comes fresh, despite the dulling routine of violence and shared agony.

The end comes abruptly, not because the narrative ends (there is hardly an arc of a story to tell), but as if in recognition that McCarthy could continually find eloquence amid the shower of emotional and physical toil he depicts. He could go on, at ten times the length of the book, finding new insight, new levels of literary expanse and shattered beauty.  But the end brings the quishy thud of the character in the kid.  Now, the man, twenty years on from the main segment of the tale, he seems to have learned nothing during that time.  That is a shame, for while the kid/man need not serve as the allegorical characterization (only a brief coda stumbles there), his lack of psychic change mars the end.  His relating to the Judge demonstrates no growth, no earned human wisdom, no change from the naive, survivalist moralism of his earlier experiences.  The reader is left with no traction on how the slaughter of landscape and human devastation helped shaped the attitudes of a generation of American identity.

Blood meridian should be read slowly, with care and abandonment of expectation. Let McCarthy's writing push you into flow, as he trips along the edges of prose into the unwinding power of poesy.

Ed Week sponsors another corporate attack on education

EdWeek once again spearheads distortion of our work, giving space to a corporatist approach to educational reform.  

The authors work for an organization with the following mission:

• Teacher Preparation Analytics, a limited liability company founded in 2011, is focused on high-leverage strategies to strengthen teacher and education administrator preparation. The company will draw on unique tools and approaches in working with individual programs or institutions, state university systems, and state or national associations, networks, and consortia to generate several instrumental outcomes that are critical to program improvement:
• Accurate, detailed analysis of the problems that compromise program excellence and the challenges that hinder program improvement
• Identification of measures, data, and methods required for ongoing program self-assessment
• Development of action plans and strategies to address key problems and challenges
• Strategic support -- research, convening, assessment, and capacity building -- for preparation programs individually or in networks dedicated to program improvement
• Research-based reports and white papers that discuss important policy and practice issues in educator preparation and provide reliable information and guidance to inform the decisions of educators and policymakers

TPA's founders are national experts on teacher preparation programs and can provide reliable information and guidance to inform decisions of educators and policymakers. TPA seeks to be an objective and effective resource on teacher preparation.

TPA is an LLC - most likely a for-profit venture.  LLC's allow partners to risk less of their own stake in the performance of the company; they are not personally on the hook if the company goes under. Other advantages include  lawsuit protection, credibility, tax savings, deductible employee benefits, asset protection, anonymity, the ease of raising capital, creating a separate legal entity for personal protection. The arose in the 1990s as a convenient way to attract foreign capital.