[AAACE-NLA] Heckman and Adult Education

[George demetrion]

Catherine,

Touché, as the French put it.  And this positivism by the faith-based folks. 
Irony never seems to trouble the Bush administration.  Why, I might start 
believing in the Marx-based notion of a "hidden curriculum."

George

From: "Catherine B. King" <cb.king at verizon.net>
Reply-To: "Catherine B. King" <cb.king at verizon.net>,National Literacy 
Advocacy List sponsored by AAACE<aaace-nla at lists.literacytent.org>
To: "National Literacy Advocacy List sponsored by 
AAACE"<aaace-nla at lists.literacytent.org>
Subject: Re: [AAACE-NLA] Heckman and Adult Education
Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:59:02 -0600

Hello George and Kenneth:

We have discussed this before on this site; but one of the issues at work in 
such a review of programs is the positivistic view of the human sciences, 
which basically begins a "performance" review from the assumption that human 
data is unhistorical and should act like, and be as predictable as, the 
natural-or-physical sciences.

This view has been thoroughly critiqued, again and again, in the 
professional literature in philosophy, in the different human-science fields 
(psychology, sociology, etc.,) and in the more synthetic field of 
educational theory.  I won't go into it again here.

However, I do think that, at this point in political time, positivism and 
post-positivism is less a wrongly embraced philosophical theory than it is a 
convenient, unthought-out position from which to fullfill already-set 
educational and social policy.  If so, then educators are lucky to be 
indulged from time to time by the powers-that-be.

Catherine King