Elizabeth Janson’s The Pinocchio Effect: Decolonialities, Spiritualities, and Identities provides an intellectually insightful, most timely, politically, educationally, and academically qualified interdisciplinary contribution to what it means to be a teacher today. This book is creatively crossing over myriad of ‘studies’ or disciplines: curriculum studies, decolonial studies, political studies, education policy studies, teacher education studies, teachers’ lives studies, gender studies, youth study, globalization studies, literary and art studies, and subaltern studies.
Janson’s study is an awesome composition of erudite, touching, moving, humorous, playful, artistic, tragic, in sum a heroic tribute to the teacher and teaching profession in our neoliberal times. The worth of Janson’s oeuvre is particularly accentuated that it is created in the country that, despite its propagandist fame as flagship of democracy, has seldom, if ever, in its official education policy practice fully recognized the dignity, significance, and importance of the teacher profession for imaginable and real spheres of human life: arts, economy, ethics, politics, science, and, after all, the quality and meaning of life for all its citizens. Actually, the watchdog of liberalism, The Economist magazine, ranks the US in the 2018 Democracy Index as a flawed democracy at position 25 after Estonia and Chile.
From an outsider point of view, there is a glaringly unparalleled gap between advancing curriculum theories in the US and the practices of US education policies, its latest instances of which are represented by subsequent education policy programs of presidents George W. Bush’s NCLB, Obama’s RTTT, Trump’s sporadic and unnamed one that nevertheless seems to make no qualitative difference with the previous ones. As William Pinar (2013) has perceptively observed the Democrats and Republicans can disagree in foreign policy, fiscal policy, military policy, etc., but, regardless of the regime in power, education policy remains the same outside the otherwise political divides and disagreements.
Against that tentative observation of the US practices of education policy and in the spirit of Itinerant Curriculum Theory (e.g. Paraskeva, 2016, 2017), I will briefly let my mind itinerate in some intellectual and geographical locales inspired by Janson’s aesthetic-pedagogic-political collage of teaching. She is thinking with a rich itinerant mosaic of decolonial theories and exposes their composition as convincing experiences and counterarguments for the mainstream US education and curriculum policy backed up by bureaucratic and anti-intellectual variants of mechanistic behaviorist and cognitive theories that appear entirely helpless in face of real theoretical, political, and practical complexities of teaching. Those intellectually torso accounts may serve, as they have done and do, the academic career of their advocates, “learning” scientists and educational psychologists of that mechanist and technological ambience. If you are a practicing teacher—as I too doubted already in the beginning of my teaching career amidst the “quite normal chaos” (cf. Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2004) of teaching—it is hard to see those mechanistic, linguistically limited, and clumsy psychological accounts much more than deeply harmful to teaching and education worth of its name and mission. Those a matter of fact a-psychological, life-alienated and self-alienated, quasi-scientific control instances of education mean a huge ‘waste of experiences’ (Santos, 2014), of talents, intellectual resources, money, time and (professional and academic) life.
One of the most potent mechanism for effecting knowledge in positive and negative senses, such as instances of epistemicide, will be made available in the educational system, with the curriculum and teacher as its very core. Education policy studies more often than not omit or neglect the decisive intellectual, organizational, and practical role of the teacher for the epistemic and moral qualities the teacher is able to create and provide within the system. For education policy studies, the teacher often seems a less important, marginal residue, an impersonal cog-in-the-machine factor in the education system.
Janson’s unique study specifies how the teacher is positioned within the education system as one of the most significant instances of and for the existing epistemicide. Drawing on Giroux’s (2012) rationale she concretely discloses the huge, chaotic, and unjust weight put on the shoulders of teachers by the supposedly rational yet suppressing, misinformed, and misguided chorus of education policies, politicians, business elite, education stakeholders, and bureaucrats:
we are told—not surprisingly by the hedge fund reformers and billionaire gurus—that schooling is about the production of trained workers; memorization is more important than critical thinking; standardized testing is better than teaching students to be self-reflective; and learning how to read texts critically is not as important as memorizing discrete bodies of allegedly factual knowledge. Having their desires and skills shaped in such a way, students and teachers are reduce to permanent underclass, denied the opportunities to develop the capacity and motivation to challenge the power and authority of a rich elite. Pedagogical practice in this neoliberal framework is cleansed of any emancipatory possibilities, stripped clean of its ability to teach students how to engage in thoughtful dialogue and use their imagination in the service of understanding lies and experiences of individuals and groups different from themselves. (pp. 21–22)
Janson’s sensitive and perceptive intellectuality, theoretical curiosity and erudition intertwined with her other personal-professional qualities: pedagogic giftedness, resilience, and mission, frank openness and empathy related to cognitive, aesthetic, political, and moral issues with her maturing and often plagued students makes her study a unique contribution to education policy and leadership studies, curriculum and teachers’ lives studies, to say the least.
Simultaneously, her study is redefining, intensifying and creatively mingling the borders of an internationalization of curriculum studies beyond geographical map toward a novel intellectual itinerant curriculum theory cartography (see Paraskeva, 2016, 2017) by introducing the elements of Curriculum of the South at the heart of neoliberal education and curriculum practices, in the United States. Janson’s explication of neoliberal measures at the level of teaching practice essentially sharpens what is pedagogically at stake when the scientific-commercial-political alliance of psychometric educational psychology and neoliberal policy rules. The structural congruence between test scores in education and the ‘bottom line’ in business render the neoliberal ideological core of concerted efforts to standardizing the world under one capitalist maxim, a maxim that after the collapse of the Soviet Union long hold the US in a kind of moral hostage about the superiority of the social and economic model particularly after the 1957 Sputnik shock.
The economic and managerial stress on education, as part of an ongoing globalization process, draws on political demands for uniformity as former U.S. foreign minister Colin Powell put it: “a major challenge for the millenium is to install freely elected democracies all over the world, under one standard for the world which is the free market system … practiced correctly.” The big political picture infusing such maxims is a vision of the world united by standardized, normative, even coercive notions of One Subjectivity, One History, One Humankind, One Politics—and, consequently, One Curriculum. Globalization in these terms would denote the pressures toward increasing uniformity, toward colonization and standardization of all spheres of human action, education as no exception. (Autio, 2009, p. 69)
The political euphoria caused by the collapse of the Soviet evidenced in the too-hasty claims in 1992 by Francis Fukuyama of the “End of History” where “liberal market democracy” assumedly has reached the apex of cultural evolution. The tone of the voice has already changed from euphoria to explicit authoritarian neoliberal dictation ten years later in 2003 by the US Secretary of Foreign Affairs Colin Powell: “free market system practiced correctly.”
The seeds for the turn of liberalism to neoliberalism preceding the Soviet collapse were sown in the 1980’s UK when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ideologically reconceptualized capitalism as the reinvention of biblical values. In Thatcher’s reading, “It is not material goods but all the great virtues exhibited by individuals working together that constitute what we call the market place” (Autio, 2012, p. 153). In fact, Thatcher, herself a Protestant believer, laid the seedbed of commercialized conception of secular morality, detached and cut off from any religious or philosophical commitments. That shift towards thoroughly secular and marketplace source of morality extends and legitimizes the neoliberal Zeitgeist: “economic thought is coterminous with rationality” (Couldry, 2012); “neoliberalism as a theory of everything” (Goodson, 2014).
Soon after the Soviet collapse in 1991, “the spirit of capitalism” (Weber, 2005) violently burst out of the bottle transforming, shaping, and colonizing all public institutions and organizations—and the sense of public good—assimilating into the organization model, discourses and vocabularies of American business corporate. As a rule, with any world political upheavals, the provision of education is among the first to be colonized by new orders. Today all the education institutions worldwide from kindergarten to universities are colonized under the simplistic economic rule in the name of educational effectiveness: ‘high outputs at lowest costs.’ Janson’s elegant summary is exhaustive:
neoliberalism values market exchange as an “ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs,” it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. This requires technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyze, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace. (Chapter 3)
The heaviest burden of reception and translation of education reforms, “implementation” in neoliberal rhetoric, is always on the teacher, the touchstone and cornerstone of any educational system. Elizabeth Janson’s study render sensible and perceivable through all registers of human senses this Sisyphean labor of teaching in the current austerity of neoliberalism.
I have elsewhere (Autio, 2017, pp. 44–45) claimed how neoliberalism discards the concept of knowledge altogether and redefines the basic curriculum question: What knowledge is of most worth? to What skills and competences are of most worth? General education is atrophied and ‘vocationalized’ as conveniently measurable skills and competences. The primitive simplification of education is an outcome of education policies purposefully informed by obsolete methodologies of learning theories in tandem with political intentions of neoliberalism. The existential original Quest for Certainty (Dewey, 1930) has been vulgarized into standardization, accountability and control, the political consequence of which we may be witnessing in the decay of democracy. Pinar (2011) emphasizes the historical succession of the US mainstream educational policy logic by a comment that critically underlines the current political connection between behaviorist-cognitive psychology and neoliberal education policy:
Since No Child Left Behind, “behavior” itself has been reduced to test-taking. It is in this sense that I have asserted that accountability in the United States is a form of neo-fascism. (p. 185)
I feel a temptation—in the spirit of Walter Mignolo’s (2000) I Think Where I Am—to briefly expose the North European Bildung/Didaktik positioning of the teacher as contrastive to the American Curriculum, summarized on the basis of Ian Westbury’s (2000, pp. 15–39) instructive juxtaposition of those two ‘superdiscourses’ of curriculum theory, and their respective reflections on the image of the teacher as a North European autonomous professional or the image of the American teacher, driven by neoliberal accountability, standardization and controlling measures.
The view of the teacher and curriculum in the Anglo-American context
- –Teacher’s role as the intellectually passive “agent of the system” (Westbury, 2000).
- –Teacher-proof curricula: “existing teachers are a (if not the) major brake on the innovation, change and reform that the schools always seem to require” (Westbury, 2000).
- –Curriculum-as-manual; a very limited space for professional autonomy, freedom, creativity, and judgment.
- –Teaching essentially means teaching to the test.
The view of the teacher and curriculum in the Bildung/Didaktik tradition
- –Curriculum is an organizational and intellectual centerpiece of education
- –“An autonomous professional teacher … has complete freedom within the framework of the Lehrplan (curriculum) to develop her or his own approaches to teaching” (Westbury, 2000).
- –The relationship between the curriculum and the teacher; the teacher as the curriculum theorist is implicitly internalized and respected in Finland
- –Teaching ideally is a combination of academic knowledge and personality: external testing and efforts of standardizing teachers’ work render a foolproof failure
- –High trust in highly educated teachers
- –Tests are not externally mandated but teacher-driven
- –Task-oriented, not test-oriented, atmosphere in the classroom
On this idealized charting, there is present a dramatic non-democratic structural preference of the system to the individual: in the American education policy view of the teacher, living teachers bring into the system a factor of human error; “existing teachers are a (if not the) major brake on the innovations, change, and reform that the schools always seem to require” (p. 21). It is perfectly feasible to think of a succession of the long instrumentalist continuum of American education that the effect of human error factor by existing teachers, could be diminished by automatization, robotization, and digitization of teaching and curriculum in accordance with other production models. This neoliberal ideal image of curriculum, teaching, and the teacher is undoubtedly in strict contrast with aspirations to promote cosmopolitan democracy, decoloniality, epistemic, social as well as educational justice and equality.
Due the neoliberal pressure on education, the above charting is in the process of transformation also in Germany and Sweden, formerly strong advocates of education and curriculum in terms of rationality as egalitarian practice, now favoring the US kind of technical and instrumental rationality as effectiveness and efficacy, supported by the ally of evidence-based scientism and neoliberal austerity, where the intellectual and political resources for education policy are anemically and detrimentally drawn mainly from the measures of external audit and assessment.
In the early 1990’s, the collapse of the Soviet Union released the spirit from a capitalist bottle with far reaching consequences particularly in education and in countries, which previously appreciated professional autonomy of teachers to apply the national framework curriculum. Sweden adopted the US style education policy drivers in their basic schooling, standardization and privatization (“fri skolor” as equivalent to US charter schools) with the result that the touch and cornerstone of any education system—the teacher—is literally disappearing. Since the early 1990’s, the Swedish right-wing politics (now social democrats are in power again) has led to the situation where there is according to the Teachers’ Union the dramatic lack of competent teachers, 60,000 in a relatively small country of about ten million inhabitants.1 The phenomenon can be related to teachers’ own assessment of how they think their work is appreciated by the public. According to the TALIS survey from 2013, 5% of Swedish teachers think their work is valued and respected; post-Soviet Estonia, who soon after new independence in 1991 adopted the US education and curriculum models, also suffers from the lack of competent teachers and low professional appeal among the youth: 14% of the Estonian teachers think their work is appreciated in public. The closest neighbor, Finland makes a dramatic difference: 57% of Finnish teachers think their work is appreciated by their people.2
Finnish basic education system lacks altogether externally mandated tests and exams; in fact, tests is a rarity in Finish basic education on the global scene: no inspecting, no testing, and no ranking. All tests are teacher-driven. There is a silent and consensual antipathy among teachers, their unions, and education administration to issues, which particularly in English speaking countries, are “implemented” as ‘quality assurance and evaluation’ (QAE) measures.
Finnish hostility towards ranking, combined with bureaucratic tradition and a developmental approach to QAE strengthened by radical municipal autonomy have resulted in the construction of nationally and locally embedded policies that have been rather effective in resisting a trans-national policy of testing and ranking. It is significant, however, that those policies represent a combination of conscious, unintended and contingent factors. (Simola, 2015, p. xv)
The design of successful education and curriculum policies may seem to require “conscious” efforts but the space and resources should be preserved, like in Finnish case, for “unintended and contingent factors” as well. These unintended and contingent factors are engendered through the daily work of academically educated, competent teachers who enjoy professional freedom, public trust and minimum of external intervention for the good of the system. The moral dimension of the curriculum is a key when teachers can combine personal, free judgment with academic knowledge and other relevant knowledge and experiences: “Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose” (Fullan, in Autio, 2012, p. 157). In Goodson’s (2014) terms,
New research findings in education reform patently show that personal and professional commitment must exist at the heart of any new changes or reforms … Good teacherhood is a personal quality … The countries that have pursued neo-liberal reforms in the fastest and deepest manner, such as England, perform very poorly in educational standards. Meanwhile, those that have defended a social democratic vision and have explicitly valued professional autonomy, such as Finland, have produced top-rate educational standards. It would seem time to seriously scrutinise the neo-liberal orthodoxy in the field of education. (pp. 42–44)
Elizabeth Janson’s book is a vivid and moving, intellectually inspiring, honest and deep commitment to the most worthwhile educational and political mission she considers and feels dear and personal: “Revealing to youth different layers of the world and analyzing with them is part of decolonizing.” Her curious, receptive and resilient teacher’s bodymind convincingly discloses the role of Itinerant Curriculum Theory at work as providing intellectual and moral vision, strength and wisdom; her curriculum travels through times and places with theories and sensitively registers cultural, social, and individual differences, disclosing a cosmopolitan resources that critically evaluates, corrects, and complements Western cultural, social, and political discourse to her students. In her teaching context, education and the curriculum are defined as a social, political and economic complex that recognizes and recognizes variation rather than standardization. Yet, all the time her touch to teaching as personal is preserved.
The problem arises when a young person is ignored. When he is treated as an object or when he is left to his own fortune. Too many young people have to live without safe adults in their neighborhood. Children enter institutions and become aware that they are problematic. Many of them begin to behave accordingly. This is the most recurring story when I talk to young people with criminal backgrounds. They report that they were plunged into deeper problems because they became cases in the authorities books. They were diary files on computers and notes in folders. They stopped being ordinary children. (Aleksis Salusjärvi3)
Notes
https://www.hm.ee/en/activities/statistics-and-analysis/talis, http://www.oecd.org/sweden/TALIS-2013-country-note-Sweden.pdf
Aleksis Salusjärvi is a literary and visual critic, cultural journalist living in Helsinki. He teaches arts at all levels.
References
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