Reading 5

The Surveillance Economy of Post-Columbine Schools
Tyson Lewis

"To control the populous, disciplinary regimes do not rely on ostentatious displays of power through violence. Rather, disciplinary power is effective because it “differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes.”

Power will always need to exert itself to control a population. This is done through a variety of laws that need to be adhered to for the safety of the populace. What differentiates this from a totalitarian regime would be the quiet, less physically abusive method. A citizen must ask him or herself if this normalization is acceptable for the safety of the populace. I would be interested to see an example of a society that does not use normalization techniques or physical pressure. Can a society exist without pressures of some sort to ensure the "safety" of the people.

Always suspecting they are under surveillance, the prisoners will become self-regulating, docile bodies, internalizing disciplined behaviors. This system “enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert, and absolutely discrete, for it functions permanently and largely in silence.”

So the answer is to give more power to this government? How strange that on the one hand people recognize this surveillance, especially the overt Patriot Act which is in the news, and yet are willing to give even MORE power to this same government (regardless of political affiliation) with respect to the banking, education and health care industries.

The newest terms that are bandied about is safety and fairness. Safety can be applied to all avenues of life: safety from hunger, unemployment, disease. In exchange people give upa lot and those who disagree are labelled through normalizing techniques "inconsiderate" or "angry" or "greedy". Ironically through discourse within each group the same terms have different meaning. What is "fair" to one group is grossly exclusive to another group.

Teachers are taught to police student work for signs of potential violence, extracting feelings and motives from creative expressions and comparing these motives against a battery of normalized prescriptions. Some teachers have protested
that such extremism only leads to hysteria and paranoia, but, at the same time, many teachers feel that the stakes are simply too high to ignore what might be warning signs.

In reality teachers were already doing this. The change was in the labelling of subsets according to criteria that was based on things that teachers didn't ordinaarily consider (ie. student-student interaction)

While such emotional hysteria might benefit the extension of disciplinary power, it certainly does not encourage the construction of democratic coalitions or critical intellectualism that is willing to challenge forms of domination and oppression.

I personally find critical intellectualism to be just as problematic. It enters the field as an outsider looking into a situation without little to no experience in practical application. Education is rife with experimental beliefs that are based in unpracticed theory and students become experiments to prove their validity. How is the construction of critical intellectualism necessarily appropriate for this purpose? Isn't the intellectual basis for educational principles in fact a hegemony that teachers are forced to follow?

American Education- Chapter 6
Joel Spring

I found this chapter to be purposefully vague and contradictory.

I was really disappointed that Spring chose to support the side againt vouchers using a TEACHERS UNION who would of COURSE be against school vouchers. And the book stated only " there is no credible evidence to prove it actually works." Is there proof it is a negative factor? The point of school vouchers is more than an academic need. If a parent wants the student to attend a new school for social or safety reasons what is to work? Who determines what works? While I am sure the evidence exists against school vouchers, Spring didn't offer any research or aticles to prove this point. This dissapointed me because I would like to have read an informed reasoning against vouchers.

What would not be reflected in the school vouchers would be the cultural frame of reference the student holds even in a new environment. The student may deal with situations with new people in the same way because they expect to have a situation play out in a particular way. This reminds me of D'Angelo's take on the Great Gatsby. The decision to create a new persona relies on the ability to let go of the past AND the willingness to be someone new. If you buy new books but never read them, you aren't any different than when you didn't own books to start with.

I would think that to be effective school vouchers would need a large measure of social and psychological intervention for students choosing to change schools for safety reasons. A new environment doesn't mean the student is necessarily safer.

Homeschooling is a controversial subject in many states. I find it highly amusing that the same teacher unions that fight accreditation for teachers then disaparage parents who homeschool for not having this same accreditaion. Many of these parents are college educated in fields more applicable to homeschooling that some certified teachers.

I think that what ties all homeschoolers together is the interest in being affective educators. The control over the child's education (regardless of political leanings) is central to the decision to homeschool. Again the parents who choose to homeschool buck againt the elite hegemony who limits what is important and what it not.