Double-plus un-education

I know this has been going on for a while, but don't we detect a kind of end-stage frantic spiraling climax? If I understand correctly--however unlikely that be in light of my pathetic loyalty to stale intellectual customs that are destroying the world and literally (srsly you guyz) killing otherkin students of all otherilks--this seems to be the plan:
(1) “redesigning assessment ecologies,” and quite a few “dimension-based rubrics."
(2) ???
(3) righteous emancipation and “inclusive excellence.”
So allrighty then.

9 comments:

Grim said...

I can see an argument for judging/grading based on effort input, versus final quality, as a way of helping students with lower class backgrounds whose education occurred in poor secondary schools. Maybe you're not performing at the same level as the A students who went to prep school, but you are trying a lot harder and you are -- consequently -- showing more positive improvement than they are. They're mostly just maintaining a high level of quality; your quality is coming up rapidly due to a much more intense effort.

It's sensible to reward and encourage that. You might reasonably hope that, by the end of the four years of undergraduate work, the poor student who works hard and improves at a higher rate will have come up in quality to very near what the prep-school kids are doing. After all, the law of diminishing returns suggests that the prep-school kids would need to work even harder to get smaller rates of improvement; but they don't actually have to work even as hard to maintain good grades.

However, there's no way to dispense with judgments about the quality of the work. I'd have to know whether you were in fact improving, and to be able to judge somewhat about the rate of improvement, for this to be a sensible project.

(I note but leave aside, for the purpose of the discussion, AVI's normal concerns about whether education/hard work/struggle is going to help all that much. I'm assuming native capacity is there, but has not been developed due to the poor quality of schooling.)

Assistant Village Idiot said...

This is where conservatives grow discouraged, as many, many people outside the cultural mainstream have pointed out that this is actually more racist, suggesting that black people are not capable of learning the nuances of formal written English, and telling them to insist on doing it their own way until culture comes around (forced by political pressure) to be what they think is right.

None of us speaks formal written English in everyday conversation. None of us. Some of us, brought up in obsessive grammar-laden families, learned a version of spoken English that is somewhat closer than what others learned. But all of us have to adjust to write, and to write for more formal audiences; or to speak publicly, and to speak before one audience or another.

To tell bright, impressionable young black people that they should not put in the effort to adjust to the requirements of formal speech and writing is to condemn them to hitting a ceiling very soon in their careers. More than one education and cultural traditionalist has suggested that this is a feature, not a bug, for the white people who will be competing against them for jobs in academia, for guest editorials, TV interviews, books sales, and speaker's bureau requests. Not that those particular white people could ever admit such a thing to themselves. They are sure that they are the true non-racists, who want to make sure that a few slots for blacks and Hispanics are preserved, so long as they don't do any of the real research, but confine themselves to railing against the unfairness of the current cultural and political scene.

It hurts to watch. I have a brother who is exactly this type of "non-racist" liberal. He did not used to be, but the need to be unconservative, to retain membership in the Liberal Club, requires that one go farther and farther away from the MLK, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and even Bill Clinton sort of liberalism, into insanity.

Korora said...

These self-styled "anti-racists" are actually doing David Duke's work for him.

Ymar Sakar said...

A group hive mind consciousness has been detected in formation. Future learning will be via DNA ancestral download not regurgitation.

Preliminary profile prototype is tge internet and social media.

Gringo said...

Seems as if they just threw a bunch of words used in prog education narratives into a word salad.
ecology/ies: check
inclusive: check
rubric: check
emancipation: check

Mix and match.

Texan99 said...

Yes, I'm still scratching my head over "dimension-based rubrics." Are those a thing? Where can I get some?

Tom said...

I think step 2 is "Dictatorship of the proletariat!"

The idea that value is determined by the labor put into production, not by demand or resulting labor saved, is a core tenet of Marxist economics.

The key figure to look at, if you're interested in educational philosophy, is Paolo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Currently #1 on Amazon in Educational Philosophy.

Tom said...

A related blog entry I found via Maggie's ...

On college administrators and schools of education

raven said...

"Yes, I'm still scratching my head over "dimension-based rubrics." Are those a thing? Where can I get some?"

Normally, they are located just in back of the funkulator cam in the turboencabulator.