Publish at May 06 2019 Updated April 20 2023
As with the end of life of elephants there is a graveyard for educational ideas. One day or night they make their little bundle of principles and ideologies, take the road to oblivion, and end up under the dust. Idea graveyards are full of good and bad intentions proven ineffective.
There are early births to be filed in the stillborn ideas that proceed from magical thinking. "I had a dream, there would be a Thomson MO5 and T07 computer in every classroom, and everyone would learn a new emancipatory language. Goodbye Greek and Latin, let's give it all up to computer language."
For lack of support, training, and programs, the dream of computing for all goes into disarray, but there's nothing to stop a new glider from asserting, "With a digital tablet for all or a TBI in every classroom or (pick the motive the story is the same) access to knowledge will be liberated at last." Technology changes but not the well-oiled mechanics of the techno dream. Wouldn't pedagogy start from a shared dream rather than just an individual whim? This is the difficulty of learning together that pedagogues are grappling with.
All-purpose pits are full of false good ideas in spades. They come back to haunt the minds of policymakers, such as "I decide on a single reading method for hundreds of thousands of teachers. Science is with me. You will have to obey the law and teach as I command." It is touchingly naive to believe that reason flattens all problems. And what reason are we talking about? Pedagogues have little truth in common except perhaps to be modest about certainties. They are not so much repeaters of circulars (and sometimes disobedience saves generations of children) as mediators of knowledge. And besides they have ideas and they take into account the singularity of their students and the specificity of situations.
So much the better because it saves us from the gap between prescribed work and real work that also exists in education. Let us bury the ultimate pedagogy without flon flon or trumpets. R.I.P. (Rest in peace) definitive ideas. Let us remember that the sun does not revolve around the earth and that what is held true one day on pain of death often proves to be outdated with time.
Some say that to remove the fever, all you have to do is break the thermometer. In the same spirit if we remove grades then we finally stabilize the level, it no longer goes up or down since there is nothing left to measure it. But shouldn't we rather think about the service that evaluation renders and the conditions that make it possible to achieve this service? Should we imagine self-evaluation or co-evaluation? Should we take the time to contractually agree on the meaning and use of a grade? If you want to kill your dog, accuse it of having rabies. How can we avoid burying grades too quickly? Under what conditions of attribution do grades allow for the development of reflexivity on one's learning path?
The early offender identification is an idea worthy of a science fiction movie. It was the brainchild of a French president known for drawing judicial scrutiny to his sometimes opaque activities. As long as he is not judged guilty, he is innocent, but for him, what would have been the result of an early detection? This desire to anticipate behavior is also the theme of the movie Minority Report. These are ideas that could be sent to an educational graveyard that could be sidereal.
The final judgment of asociality deserves to be thrown far away into an inaccessible asteroid belt. One more ball and chain to let corrode. The human being does not cease to spread out in time and space. It is his nature to be changeable and to transform himself according to human interactions. If we had locked up the criminal Vidocq permanently, we would have lost the chance to have the brilliant police chief Vidocq. Exemplary conversion isn't it?
One can have a particular affection for grandiose educational architecture. Schools that are too big or poorly thought out, whose heirs struggle for years to meet the costs of maintenance. The barrack schools where students are packed like eggs in a box could be placed on a funeral pyre so much they produce coerced behavior and reduce the student to inhabiting the role of impersonal pawn from one box-room to another box-room.
Among the most damaging ideas to be buried in a lead coffin must be counted the nationalist textbooks preparing for hatred. Alice Miller had identified such books in nineteenth-century France and Germany with the results we know. Millions of dead heroes and patriots populate the cemeteries on both sides of the Rhine. We can bet that ghosts have escaped from the cemeteries, for there are still textbooks full of prejudice and resentment that believe Israelis and Palestinians, and others that convey stereotypes and truncated opinions. There are even some secondary schools in India where religion and Kalashnikovs are taught. This pedagogical cocktail produces little openness to the other.
The hybridization of pedagogical devices outside of the need of an audience or the skills of the teams in charge of developing it is to be classified in the category of "petty murders between friends" or poison and old lace". Indeed, many leaders who have arrived at the management of business order the digital pedagogy in disregard of the trades and decennial knowledge on the conditions of success of the implementation of digital. Let's bury the idea of the digital pedagogical without pain that saves time and money. The benefit is possible but precisely on the condition of investing time and money in the development of the knowledge-act of all.
The fiasco of privatization of schools in Sweden, one of Europe's good educational students, is not unlike the bubble around student loans in North America. Does the market marry well with pedagogy? Not sure. In Sweden, privatization is driving inflation of good grades, facilitated by the fact that national exams are often corrected by teachers from the same school as the students
In 1967 an American teacher's experience with autocracy in a high school recalled in the film "The Wave" reminds us of how easily evil can be seduced. In the context of a pedagogical demonstration, the teacher establishes the foundations of a dictatorship, and the game ends up installing stigmatizing and coercive behaviors within the class. The experience reminds us of "the banality of evil". Placed in a position of authority the teacher who would not be accountable to anyone can produce monstrosities, and one could say that this risk is lurking for any pedagogical leader who would refuse any right to look at his practice or his decisions.
Shouldn't pedagogues choose as their epitaph "ci-git pedagogical certainties," so much do they prevent listening to reality. A word of advice: if ideas come to you and a little funeral music accompanies them in a sort of air of déjà vu, use the technique of the idea nursery.
Write it down so you don't risk losing sight of it, let it grow a little. Exchange with peers to improve it temper it and, why not a folly, involve learners in building their own learning framework.? In fact, this madness could be a second track. Think of the other as the author of his or her life, not the vessel of an educational policy.
Sources
Southwest - Digital tablets in school, a false good idea https://www.sudouest.fr/2017/11/28/tablettes-numeriques-a-l-ecole-une-fausse-bonne-idee-3987166-4699.php
Wikipedia The Wave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(movie)
The new obs When Sarkozy wanted to detect behavioral disorders in children
https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/20081201.OBS3496/quand-sarkozy-voulait-detecter-les-troubles-du-comportement-chez-l-enfant.html
Alice Miller it's for your own good https://www.alice-miller.com/cest-for-your-good/
Minority report http://passeurdesciences.blog.lemonde.fr/2013/04/01/la-science-qui-veut-predire-les-crimes/
The point college reform the fiasco
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/reforme-du-college-le-fiasco-quebecois-11-03-2016-2024736_23.php
Cahiers Pédagogiques Is removing grades cheating students ?
http://www.cahiers-pedagogiques.com/Deleting-notes-is-this-trumping-the-students
Le monde diplomatique - School privatization, the Swedish fiasco
https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/09/GOARANT/59043
LCI - Syllabic method, global definition what are these pedagogies of learning to read https://www.lci.fr/societe/methode-syllabique-globale-definition-en-quoi-consiste-ces-pedagogies-de-l-apprentissage-de-la-lecture-jean-michel-blanquer-ecole-primaire-2062422.html
Oury, F., & Pain, J. (1972). Chronicle of the barrack school. FeniXX.
Wikipedia - Eugene François Vidocq
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne-Fran%C3%A7ois_Vidocq
Société informatique de France - Informatique pour tous
https://www.societe-informatique-de-france.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1024-5-baude.pdf
Wikipedia - Alice Miller - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller
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