Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction

THIS is a book of great length (444 pages of text), great learning (168 pages of notes), but not of commensurate understanding. It is a pity, because its defects may conceal its undoubted merits. When Dr. Popper is not caricaturing writers whose views he dislikes-and he dislikes a great many-he has a useful contribution to make to political thought, and his general moral theory (mainly to be found in the notes) is eminently sane and sensible. But for his passion for tilting at windmills he would have written a better and shorter book. The Open Society and its Enemies By K. R. Popper. Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato. Pp. vii + 268. Vol. 2: The High Tide of Prophecy—Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath. Pp. v + 352. (London: George Koutledge and Sons, Ltd., 1945.) 2 vols., 42s. net.

The Open Society and its Enemies

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.

Urban Outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality

THE chorus of approval with which Mr. Mundella's report on the progress of elementary education was received on Monday cannot but be gratifying to all who have at heart the highest welfare of the country. With one or two unimportant exceptions—members whose vision is so bizarre as to discern communism in the education of the children of the working classes, and who connect the increase of weeds with the spread of education'what criticism there was referred to details of method. All the members whose opinions are of any weight agreed that vast good had resulted to the country by the working of the Code. As to the special subjects, among which science is included, the weight of opinion was decidedly in favour of their retention. The greatest friends of the Fourth Schedule will admit that there is still much room for improvement in the teaching of these subjects; it cannot be expected that so great a novelty in the system of elementary education in the country can all at once be taught to perfection. About the success of the compulsory system of education it may be said that the House was all but unanimous. The analogy between the treatment of paupers and the free education of the children of the working classes will not hold water. In the one case we are simply keeping from starvation people whose improvidence or misfortune have made them a dead burden on their fellows; in the other case we are feeding the minds of those who one day will have to bear the brunt of the work of the nation; The better these future workers are educated, the more intelligently and the more effectively are they likely to do their work, and the less likely are they to become inmates of our workhouses and prisons. As Serjeant Simon testified, even already is there a marked decrease of embryo criminals in our streets. The conclusion come to by Mr. Mimdella and those who,like him, have the interests of education at heart, is not that we have gone too far, but that we have not gone far enough; not that we have reached finality, but that we have only made a good beginning. The figures he adduced to prove the success of the existing Education Act were practically admitted to be irrefutable; and we only trust the progress in the next ten years will be at an equal ratio to that achieved during the past decade. “Many of us,” he truly said, “would pass away without seeing the full effect of the work we are doing.” As to the propriety of encouraging the retention of exceptionally clever boys in elementary schools beyond the regulation age, the figures showed that it would be cruel and unjust to forbid this. Until we have a State system of secondary education in England similar to that about to be sanctioned in Scotland, until air equally decisive step is taken with regard to educational endowments in the one country as in the other, the nation would be doing a gross injustice to force exceptionally clever boys to leave school just when their intellects were beginning to shoot into full vigour. Mr. Mundella showed by his figures that Scotland is still ahead of England in the matter of education; that extra or special subjects are more widely sought after and with greater success, and that a larger percentage of children in elementary schools proceed to secondary education. But it should be remembered that this is the result of many generations of universal education, and that in Scotland it has long been considered as great a disgrace to be uneducated as in England it is considered to be immoral. There among the great majority of the working classes compulsory education was scarcely needed, and this will no doubt be the case in England in the course of a century or so, when education will have become as great a necessity as decent clothing. Again during the debate was it shown by those who have the best means of knowing that where science is properly taught there the children are as a rule more intelligent and bright, and better up in the ordinary subjects than in schools where science is neglected. Sir John Lubbock gave a remarkable instance of the favour with which properly conducted science-teaching is received by the children themselves:—

The Education Debate

CLASS AND SCHOOLS - USING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM TO CLOSE THE BLACK-WHITE ACHIEVEMENT GAP RICHARD ROTHSTEIN ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON, DC 2004 PAPERBACK: $18.98 * 1-932066-09-8 The theme of Class and Schools centers on closing the achievement gap between Black and White students. The author discusses various governmental reforms such as economic, social and medical changes, that must be implemented before the achievement gap will ever truly be bridged. The organization of the book is set up to initially explain the achievement gap between Black and White students and how social class has a great impact on the difference in scores. The order of the chapters is logical. Defining the achievement gap, social class differences in raising children, and cultural differences between Black and White students are discussed. By the fifth chapter, the author begins illustrating what reforms need to take place to close the achievement gap. The clear organization of the chapters helped to give background information and facts. Each chapter is broken down into topics that are all linked by a single heading; this connected ideas seamlessly. The preface is written by a renowned economist, which gives credibility to statements the author made in the book. The introduction gives useful background facts on the desegregation of public schools. The author uses bar graphs effectively to visually represent information. Especially practical is the endnotes section because everything is referenced and numbered. The amount of facts and history contained in the endnotes alone helps to clearly state the author's point of view. There is an Appendix titled "What employers say about graduates" that is insightful and magnifies the current problem of what is not being tested on standardized tests. The book consists of five chapters. Chapter One highlights historical background of the achievement gap, misunderstandings about the concept, genetic factors, social class, health care, cultural and even housing differences that affect student performance. Rhetorical questions help to analyze whether cultural background or society explain discrepancies in academic achievement. The most startling facts from this chapter are statistics about the size of the vocabulary of the middle-class kindergartener being raised in a home with college educated parents, compared to the vocabulary of the Black kindergartener from the home of non-degreed parents. The middle-class child begins school with a vocabulary equivalent to that of the lower-class Black adult. Chapter Two explains how some schools "beat the demographic odds" when it comes to student achievement gaps, and within the chapter examples of the schools are given. There is a particularly interesting discussion by Dr. William Sanders about what he refers to as the "Tennessee value-added assessment system." This system separates the influence of teachers on the achievement gap from the child's family background, health and academic potential. This is a new twist for public school educators because only some of the blame could be placed on teachers for low achievement, according to the method of Dr. Sanders. Even more interesting is that the results of Dr. Sander's study only work for teachers who teach math and not reading. It is important to note that literacy is a much more difficult concept to measure on any test. There is also mention that "no excuses" schools are not really what they seem to be. For example, in one school in New York City, children who were labeled "low income" actually lived with parents who were on graduate stipends from Harvard. The income level was low, but the familial education and literacy did not accurately reflect at-risk students. Incorrectly holding schools accountable for closing the achievement gap is the main crux of Chapter Three. …

Class and Schools - Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap

Teach for All is a good example of a globally travelling educational reform policy. In this article, we examine the rhetoric of the reform through an analysis of its public discourse, specifically the websites for the umbrella organization, 3 of its 35 constituent projects (Teach for America, Teach First and Teach for China) and one associated project (Teach First Norway). The analysis focuses on the rhetorical production of teaching as something done to other people’s children, in places apart from and outside the communities and schools of dominant populations, and for a while only – as a short-term mission rather than what is usually understood as a professional career. We argue that the principal motive underlying Teach for All’s rhetoric is the cultivation of a cadre of leaders and a form of neoliberal social entrepreneurship that it claims will solve the problem of ‘broken’ societies, public services and, specifically, schools.

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Teaching Other People's Children, Elsewhere, for a While: The Rhetoric of a Travelling Educational Reform.

This article addresses the question: how do a new cadre of teacher education providers in England, imbued in the discourses of the Global Education Reform Movement, construct the problem of a suppo...

/pdf/teacher-education-and-the-germ-policy-entrepreneurship-nlp2n1lblg.pdf

Teacher education and the GERM: policy entrepreneurship, disruptive innovation and the rhetorics of reform

The struggle for teacher education

The article presents the concept of rhetorical agency to understand and analyse the parallel and paradoxical agencies teachers are offered, and limited by, under discourses of globalisation within ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1478210315612643

The Glocal Teacher: The paradox agency of teaching in a glocalised world

This article presents a critical rhetorical analysis of the governing and reform ideology of the Norwegian school system of the 1990s. It uses Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies as a critical resource in the reading of the reforms, and discusses some of the consequences of the regime's models of leadership and public management for important pedagogical qualities of the school system.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2011.9.5.631

Tom Are Trippestad

Papers

Teaching Other People's Children, Elsewhere, for a While: The Rhetoric of a Travelling Educational Reform.

Teacher education and the GERM: policy entrepreneurship, disruptive innovation and the rhetorics of reform

The struggle for teacher education

The Glocal Teacher: The paradox agency of teaching in a glocalised world

The Rhetoric of a Reform: The Construction of ‘Public’, ‘Management’ and the ‘New’ in Norwegian Education Reforms of the 1990s