Where Student Rights Begin
Fresh perspectives on student rights, autonomy, and freedom of conscience in education.
The Critique of "Educationspeak" and Progressivist Rituals
Messy demoralization almost seems at times as if it were a progressivist educational principle-a way of life, a regimen, a crucible, a sanctimonious growing pain, a group-life skill of a sort, the high-flown rationales of which resound with arcane refrains, pat abstractions, oft-recited buzzwords at their emptiest as in such wonderments as learning how to learn constructivistically as merrily thematically reflectively discovery-oriented learning-now-made-whole-inspired meaning makers learning how to carry on with roles designed to serve the greater good of a learning group experiencing holistic interrelations between the cognitive and psychomotor as well as affective learning domains, the better to satisfy criteria for authentic assessment of course.
Educationspeak. The English language could use a break from it. Empty is the word "education" itself when people are taken for granted as toys of confused educational fads, when human individuals are taken for granted as plastic raw material to be injected into the latest pseudo-humanist molds. A smidgen of humane intuition alone would go a long way to avoid inflicting the unlovely distortions of human relations of the kind recounted herein.
The Rationalization of Social Engineering
Yet those were not the only such events. They seem to have their ways of being unapologetically rationalized as part of the price of human progress in advanced thinkers' classroom social-engineering fancies cheerily carrying on as apparently they must with their cultures of cutesy shows, hapless roles, dippy songs, throwaway kitsch, frivolous fun and games and other pretensions in the name of whatever, good for occupying class time until the bell rings and little if anything else in actuality. Pedagogical theories have too often glibly suffocated personal rights that should have been guaranteed in a free society. Even when nothing is obviously amiss, the starry-eyed overvaluation of togetherness entails a subtle suppression of the rights of individuals to be genuine persons of their own.
The Illusion of Cooperative Creativity
The unperceptive instigation of less-than-honest social behavior amounts to a hidden curriculum that promotes acquiescence to life as a sham activity-a hopeless virtue of becoming all manner of the hokiest things for the ever so greater good of nobody ever proves what. The encroachment on legitimate individuality is at its most insidious in the tone-deaf call for cooperative creativity. Granted, creativity is often a cooperative enterprise. But counterfeit creativity is worse by far than a forthright lack thereof, and indiscriminate cooperation imperatives can easily be destructive to the real phenomenon.
To the latter point I ask the reader to consider a hypothetical society ruled by a rigid ideology of cooperation-one perhaps in which all the people are expected to play well together and kiss up in groups to a clueless Ministry of Culture that blithely goes assuming, say, that a team composed of authors Updike, Mailer, Wolfe and Irving should have been able to thrive at the task of writing a novel together, or better yet that a very obliging Miles Davis should have been able to thrive, say, by happily trumpeting away in accord with the needs of a Dixieland group. A wretched state of affairs indeed. And yet assumptions no less naive are all too easily imposed in the name of educational group-creativity agendas.
Reinstating Common Courtesy and Practical Cooperation
