Mayher 1:
Starting from the end, my immediate thought is that I'm struck by how capitalistic our schooling is. I'm thinking of two passages near the end of Mayher's piece, about some pressure I have received from my chair to keep my grades down—or in fact to lower them, and from Mike's comment about a notion that I have always felt must be true: that if you design and teach a writing course well, there is no reason that anyone who chooses to engage should not be able to succeed well, earning at least a B or an A. (Deep breath.) At the end of Mayher's piece, he talks about the creation of standardized testing and how the answers that every gets right are thrown out; this is the best way for the tests to do their job, to show the differences between the students. Slightly earlier, he mentions that the 'uncommonsense' view of education is similar to what Mike had said, and that, “if all students are taught how to learn, there will be fewer differences among them in terms of their capacity to do so” (p. 133, his emphasis). This clearly demonstrates the democratic principles of education. And yet, it seems that schools right this principle tooth and nail. The don't want similarities; they want differences. How else will they know who is on top and who is on bottom? This is similar to how we assess academic rigor at least at my college. They want tougher grading. I am choosing to call this capitalistic because there seems to be a notion here that learning operates like capital, that it is a zero sum game: all students cannot learn well, it says. If some are rich, others must by definition be poor. I have never realized before how truly American our school system is. This to me is the very worst notion of capitalism, the underbelly of the American dream—those poor people who have to build your white picket fence.
I see no actual, logical reason that indicates that learning is capital. I can only imagine that the notion of capital is so structured into nearly everything we do in our society that it bleeds into our schooling as well. Why would it be the case that, if the course is taught well and if the students try, that all students can't do well? I now recall my first semester in grad school at BU when I was a TA for a 400 student first year undergraduate class. There were 20 TA, with 20 students each in a course co-taught by the two deans. One thing they told us up front was, the average grade in the class would be a B-. This was before even meeting a single student. This was very offensive to me. I can see the ways in which it does make sense; they are talking about the average, not predicting any one student's abilities. But still, this notion of capitalism remains. Somehow, if the students' average was too high, the teachers weren't doing there jobs. How backwards is that? I mean, a teacher's job, one would think, is to help students learn, and the better they do it, the better the students should perform; yet, if that happens and the students do perform well, now the teacher has done a bad job... What would it mean in this scenario for a teacher to have done a good job? It is ironic that this philosophy reflects what Mayher calls the “commonsense” view. Granted, there is more than a touch of irony in his naming, but the very Catch-22 notion of this idea makes it even better. Why, I wonder, do we need to view knowledge and learning as if there is a limited number in the room and that if some students have more, others must have less—I wonder if other, less capitalistic cultures have the same notions, or if it is a product of our deeper mind set. In my gut I imagine that this notion hold true in nearly all formal schooling, so my whole premise here is probably deeply flawed. If, of course, deeply interestingly fascinating...
As a parting idea, I will note that Mayher's uncommonsense view is clearly and deeply reflective of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and of Freire's notion of resolving the student-teacher contradiction, and in those ways follows a much more socialist/neo-Marxist perspective. This is what I noticed first. It wasn't until later that I realized that what we tend to do is treat education like capital. I think this is an important insight, at least for me and my work and interests.
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