"The painful truth is now beginning to emerge that a flourishing technology may make civilization more rather than less difficult of attainment. It leads to mobilization of external forces; it creates enormous concentrations of irresponsible power; through an inexorable standardization it destroys refinement and individuality" (Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay 31-32).
Kevin Bacon is certain that he has left something unsaid, something very important that only English teachers can see in his grammar. I would argue that, with the Standards-based model of education, Mr. Bacon and others are turning the tables on us. They might not be able to watch our grammar, but they can watch how our students meet the standard. It isn't enough that teachers are observed, that parents and civic leaders are invited into the classroom to see how the "standards" are implemented on a day-to-day basis. It isn't enough that universities can show how their teacher-training programs target particular standards of learning. Even under those conditions of surveillance, there's still something that is left unseen: the problem with education these days.
How do we know that there is something unseen that needs to be brought into the light? How did we know there was a problem even before "standards" and "standards-based" tests were implemented? I'm not asking this question in order to suggest that recognizing "the problem" is, in fact, a way of making "the problem." Such a suggestion would be too much like former President Reagan's quip that he might have grown up poor, but that was ok, since he didn't know it at the time. I'm asking where this presumption of the "unseen" might have originated.
We find the beginnings of an answer to our question in the 1983 "Nation at Risk" report, which is often identified as a founding moment in the history of standards-based education. The report was commissioned by Secretary of Education T. H. Bell as a response to what Mr. Bell called "the widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system." The report, a result of an 18-month survey of expert and non-expert opinion, concluded that the "public" did indeed have reason for concern: American public schools were not graduating students who could get jobs or who would be prepared for a college-level academic work:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. ("Nation at Risk")
Seventeen years after its initial publication, "Nation at Risk" very much appears to be the product of a different time. The arms race, the Sputnik challenge may seem to us now as fictions that have ceased to make their effect in the real. But in the early 1980's, these effective fictions helped to create a "nation of educators" who not only knew what the problem was (people are broke; people can't pay their mortgages), they knew why there was such a problem:
These [educational] deficiencies come at a time when the demand for highly skilled workers in new fields is accelerating rapidly. For example: Computers and computer-controlled equipment are penetrating every aspect of our lives--homes, factories, and offices. One estimate indicates that by the turn of the century millions of jobs will involve laser technology and robotics. Technology is radically transforming a host of other occupations. They include health care, medical science, energy production, food processing, construction, and the building, repair, and maintenance of sophisticated scientific, educational, military, and industrial equipment. ("Nation at Risk")
Again, the problem isn't that we're ignorant. Ignorance is seen (as a problem) only when we're out of work, when we can't purchase as much as we would like or as much as the economy requires us to. Readers of Kairos may find here one possible source for America's love/hate relationship with technology; certainly, we can see here how "technology" became a pivot in the rhetoric of educational reform in the past two decades. Technology (the term) allows us to see the unseen thing hiding in our educational system: the fact that ignorance is bad. If we weren't living in a technologically-demanding work, we might make ignorance not such a bad thing (that is, insure that there is no correlation between education and employment). That option having been foreclosed, however, we must continue to see more of the ignorance. Seeing more of the ignorance is the solution then. After all, we now understand that ignorance is a bad thing, and no one would consciously choose to do a bad thing. This is the promise of standards-driven education: the more standards there are the more ignorance we see; the more ignorance we see the less ignorance there will be.
At the very least, this is one way to account for the excitement and presumption of effect driving the SOL-movement. When someone tells us that, as of December 1999, 45 states had adopted standards for learning in English, mathematics, science, history/social sciences, this isn't merely a statement of fact. The statement is a promissory note for the future: "at last, we're going to see more ignorance, so more people can choose to be not ignorant."
