Response to Sherman Dorn

Note--since we don't have much up yet, I'm going to post this instead of comment.
Sherman Dorn said...

Aaron writes, Poor and working-class people are much less interested in expressing their individuality amidst collective action. This is a markedly different world from the one I live in, where I read the late Octavia Butler, where my undergraduate advisor urged my classmates and me to take the intellectual work of ordinary Americans seriously as intellectual history, and where Mike Rose has made his life's work convincing educators to open up children from working-class backgrounds to the life of the mind. It is also a bit of a figment to suppose that the maintenance of privilege is an individual thing. It is collective, if hidden by the social networks that pass social capital so easily—the better schools, how to handle principals, and so forth.

In many ways, my difference with Aaron is one of emphasis. I don't deny the existence of collective strategies, but I think it's wrong to assume that such strategies are incompatible with individuality. One of the hallmarks of responses to high-stakes testing is the use of test-prep to further bifurcate education: My strong impression is that schools with high poverty tend to focus on decontextualised, deskilled test-prep as the response to high-stakes testing, while schools with higher proportions of privileged kids do their best to maintain some individuality. The suppression of creativity and individuality these days doesn't strike me as wise or likely to reduce the real advantages of the already privileged. Nor does recognition of the collective always advance wisdom. If collective strategies means taking Princeton Review courses together, count me out!

Reply:
Of course, I agree with Sherman. Standardization through crappy tests is a horrible problem. And I don't mean to diminish the tragedy of our high-poverty schools. But, as we know, part of the problem of these schools is that they are run almost entirely by middle-class people who have little or no understanding or respect for the culture of those they are working with. (At some other point I want to talk about the paradox of professionalism that ensures highly "qualified" teachers and at the same time systematically excludes teachers who retain core aspects of local marginalized communities).

More generally, I think your response is an indicator of how limited our (not yours in particular) collective conceptions of individuality and collectivity are in education. There are other quite sophisticated ways to conceptualize joint action beyond Dewey's, with its focus on enhancing the distinctiveness of individuals through participation. And I am not critiquing our focus on enhancing the expressiveness and critical capacity of individuals. I actually write and publish short stories in my non-academic life, and used to teach creative writing. But I think this is not enough. And there are quite subtle and rich forms of individuality resident in cultures beyond our upper-middle-class one that we generally don't think about--not just the Princeton Review approach. A discussion of some aspects of this can be found in Patricia Hill Collin's book _Black Feminist Thought_.