[NLA] Thursday Notes, 3/14/02
Catherine King
cb.king at verizon.net
Sat Mar 23 12:54:56 EST 2002
Hello Gloria:
In my past life, I owned and operated a small
3-shop chain of florists started from a
partnership, a mall location, and finally into
a seven-year successful business experience
with employees, customers, chamber of commerce
involvement, the whole working CEO thing. I finally
burned out, wanted to spend more time with my
family, and went to college at 32 where I fell in love
with it and philosophy.
So, like Harry, I am an entrepreneur at heart and
consider these threads extremely creative forces
in our culture from the point of view of having
experienced it.
It is from this view that I can understand why it is
legitimate in some sense, as you say, for business
people to look at their employees as a means to an
end. In an optimum environment, everyone works for
the same goal of excellence and everyone benefits
by and from that work.
The educator, on the other hand, needs to look beyond
this view and to understand the full gamut of what
education is about and how it relates to our social-
political foundations, including that the learner is also
an end-in-ourselves, beyond our-his-her work capacity
or how we-he-she fits into a means-corporate situation.
And then there are those who cannot work, or do not
work, or who are just people who live in this culture and
want to educate and improve themselves. These are
all our clients regardless of how businesses relate to
them.
This broader understanding is more, not less, true for
educators when many others do not understand this
fullness, including many business-corporate people, and
more importantly, our policy makers who are supposed
to be involved with **the people** as individuals in our
commonwealth regardless of capitalist issues. We
don't have to pay or work to get in.
Certainly there are many creative and legitimate
corporate-education situations. No one is saying there
is not. I for one agree with you on this.
But as teachers we must not allow the real good of these
relationships to negate the socio-political context that these
relationships rest in--or to obscure the great harm that has
been done in many systematic situations, and is continuing
to be done, in the name of:
(1) myopic and self-serving ignorance of **intemperate**
capitalist power (greed) and its pervasive and sometimes
covert (to those who fail to see) negative effects, or
(2) a well-heeled conscious effort to determine and
maintain systematic policy to, in fact, shut out certain
"peculiar" groups of people, or to maintain systems that
oppress many by "roadblocking," diversions, half-truths,
and especially by conning teachers and sugar-coating
political murder or by making it seem like suicide.
There is no neutral political ground where education is
concerned.
If teachers do not have the "big picture" about the liberating
and-or oppressing dimensions of education, or about the
realities of **some** quite large corporate interests being
served at the continued detriment of our clients, then we
are de facto involved in that oppression--even though we
are not aware of it and even though we see many good
things going on in the corporate-education relationship.
The bad in any case rarely is open to the light but hides
itself in a thicket of diversions. If this is true, then keeping
well-meaning teachers naive is an important part of this
diversion.
Not all that glitters is gold. And corporations as a general
rule have the best handle that I know of on glitterati. Like
you, I don't mind the glitter at all--as an out-of-the closet
entrepreneur, I love it. I just don't want to have it on me,
as an educator or as an entrepreneur, if it smells.
Regards,
Catherine King
---- Original Message -----
From: Gloria Gillette
To: nla at lists.literacytent.org
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 3:10 PM
Subject: Re: [NLA] Thursday Notes, 3/14/02
Catherine,
For this adult educator I see adult education as means, not an end.
I consider it a means to community involvement, advancement in the workplace
a means to family enrichment.
Of course I hope that my former students are now reading for the joy of it, but that is my hope, not necessarily theirs. I hope that the education they found was the beginning not the end to whatever it was they sought.
If we continue to view education for education's sake, then we will be marginalized because not many people are willing to fund that noble idea.
Instead I am suggesting that we tap into the business of business that has built this country. Of course business wants a return on their investment. I am simply saying that does not contradict our purposes. We know that an educated person
enhances all of us, as a country as a society. Business is grappling with the issue of education and of course they see it in terms of the bottom line.
But in some way, we (both camps) are saying the same thing. Education is a good thing whether it is measured in ROI or on social activism.
Quite frankly, I don't care who funds education-as long as it gets funded.
I think there is at times a bias on this list that creates the idea that we are in opposition. I simply don't see it that way. I don't read it that way in many business publications, nor do I think it is productive to continue that divide. I read far more support in business for education than I read support or understanding for business in the education world. And to me, that is close minded on our part.
I think every teacher ought to take a few courses from the business school to have a broad view of the world. There is a logic in business-it is good if it supports the bottom line. We know without question that education does just that.
I think our energies are better spent finding common ground.
Gloria Gillette
----- Original Message -----
From: Catherine King
To: nla at lists.literacytent.org
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: [NLA] Thursday Notes, 3/14/02
Gloria:
Your post to Harry reflects some basic differences
in education and business/corporations, on the one
hand, and how both understand their relationship to
a democratic government on the other.
Basically, for business, workers and their education
are a means for business. Whereas, for adult
education, students and their education are, first
and foremost, an end. That is, education is not for
someone else, or some business concern, but
basically for them. Even though education may
help our students with their work skills, these skills
are not only for business, but are also for our
students themselves--they are the legitimate end
of education, as it were, to improve our quality
of life as such.
But for many businesses, adults are merely there
to serve another end, and this is not all bad, of
course.
Certainly there is nothing to preclude business/
corporate heads from identifying worker-development
as a kind of profit, and there are some movements
going on that are trying to broaden the meaning of
profit in business as we speak. But unfortunately
many still see workers like horses, or worse,
machines--all of which find their only worth in
serving the bottom line of corporate development
regardless of other costs.
As Harry and others point out, there is a basic
conflict here that we in education need to keep in
mind--we need to remember who we are and what
we are about, and how that differs, and is even in
conflict with, some who are quite involved with
education.
And if the teachers in my education classes are any
indication, many educators really have no clue about
these basic conflicts and, therefore, seem to be
unaware when the fox walks right into chicken house
with a pretty checkbook and a napkin around its neck?
But though I see much in your note about the relationship
of education to business and how educators shouldn't
raise such questions but be more amenable to business
concerns (of course this is not a kind of prostitution even
though it might look that way to some), you don't mention
how government relates to either.
But the relationship of powerful business concerns to
government policy makers is THE issue, not just in
education, but across the board at present. Harry has
suggested that corporate concerns are a large political
force behind the swing towards charter schools, where
those who make and market computers/software are
able to develop their lucrative markets in a way they
haven't found possible in the public-school arena.
In your note you seem to assume the dialogue is only
between business and education. But where are our
government policy makers, and who among them are
only influenced by business without a critical inspection
of either motivations or real outcomes? And who
among them have either individual adults in mind as
a "fourth branch of government," or the good of a
mature democracy where education of adults in a
complex world is a value all by itself, regardless
of business concerns?
Harry and you quote "Embracing e-learning in our
states . . . to improve competitiveness" by our
National Governor's Association. Are our governors,
as state officials, working only for the bottom line?
It also says: "unprecedented growth and
opportunity for all Americans."
Do they mean what we might mean by that? And
where does educating the adult as someone not
necessarily working at a corporate site fit in here?
Or does it anymore? And if not, what happened
to educating the polity to safeguard democratic
practices in a complex world? Do we just hope
that rides in subterraneously on overt business
motivations?
And about crossing lines between business and
education. Which business heads, especially inter-
national corporate powers, understand themselves
as part of a democratic political entity beholding to
"the people;" and which see the corporation as a
part of that larger fabric "of, for and by the people"?
Have they enamoured us all with their glitz and
communicative power?
Certainly there are authentic business-education
partnerships. But they are only authentic when both
educators and business people understand themselves
as involved in common concerns under a common
democratic-republican political arena and do nothing
to decay and destroy those common concerns.
And this is the failure of many educators who, of all
people, should be excruciatingly aware of the political
dimension of all teaching, and how that may come into
conflict in all our relationships with business concerns.
I don't see the conflict ultimately as between "business
and education." It's really between people in powerful
positions who often have no regard for those who have
no power, and who fail to see their complicity in their
own crises in the long run if not the short. Ultimately it
is quite a personal matter of moral-political self-
definition and vision, and understanding or not.
But when a lack of political consciousness on the part of
powerful people is endorsed by educators through a
lack of political understanding, something incredibly
important is lost in the world.
Regards,
Catherine King
----- Original Message -----
From: Gloria Gillette
To: nla at lists.literacytent.org
Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2002 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: [NLA] Thursday Notes, 3/14/02
Harry,
The American Society of Training and Development (ASTD) and the National Governors Associations are not exactly unknowns, nor do these words offend me in any way:
(.. to make e-learning the cornerstone of a national effort to develop a skilled workforce for America's digital economy . . . .By embracing e-learning in our states, our communities and our organizations, ( What does this mean? ) we can improve our competitiveness and point the way to a new era of unprecedented growth and opportunity for all Americans).
What the ASTD does not do, is say that education is the exclusive domain of "educators" and that what the field of training and education (by the way, that's us) has failed to do is adequately express or convince the business world of the importance of education. It is the inability of "educators" to collaborate and cross the divide into the realm of business (such as Catherine's post ) that stymies much of of our work.
Read ASTD's white paper "Profit from Learning: Do Firm's Investments in Education and Training Pay Off?"
In it they say:
"Although it is now commonly understood that the acquisition of knowledge is central to the competitive advantage of individuals and organizations in today's economy, the question of how much to invest in workforce education and training has long confounded business executives and managers alike.The problem:firms have never had good information...."
As an adullt educator what does that tell you?
It tells me that we are not very good at communicating, at crossing the divide,
at making our point. Diatribes on how we are marginalized and whoa is us, and us against them only diminish our work and our importance.
If we've failed to let the business world understand and know our importance, if we've failed to learn their vocabulary and to communicate, who's bad is it?
Gloria Gillette
----- Original Message -----
From: Harry Forster
To: nla at lists.literacytent.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 9:09 AM
Subject: Re: [NLA] Thursday Notes, 3/14/02
Gloria Gillette wrote:
Catherine,
I have tried to keep an open mind through your postings, but honestly when you say things such as:
In some situations and to some folks,
educating adults is counter-productive to their
financial, and so their political, concerns
This situation affects AE programs in the USA when
policy makers are influenced by those among us who
consider educated or socially-politically aware adults
as a dangerous threat to their corporate-business
concerns.
Do you really think "corporate-business concerns" sit around and conspire against literacy?
I'm quite democratic in my concern for good writing. Even the most pedantic diatribe can lack critical thinking skills.
Gloria Gillette
I am not sure that "against" is the correct term but there are some realities that I think are necessary for policy planners to understand. I have some personal experiences that are difficult to comprehend. They make Catherine look benign. Below is part of an email that I sent to Catherine. It comes from a report sent in a Thursday Notes: "Using Electronic Assessment to Measure Student Performance"
"The Commission on Technology and Adult Learning, (Who is this group? What do they do? How are you related to them?) sponsored by the American Society for Training and Development and the National Governors Association, has expressed a similar sentiment. "The commission . . . encourages governors, CEOs and other leaders ( Why does it not explicitly indicate educators or adult educators? It is ommissions of this type that raise questions in my mind. I see this often.) to make e-learning the cornerstone of a national effort to develop a skilled workforce for America's digital economy . . . .By embracing e-learning in our states, our communities and our organizations, ( What does this mean? ) we can improve our competitiveness and point the way to a new era of unprecedented growth and opportunity for all Americans. (Do you think that this is the panacea that they say it is?)"
[ page 2]
I believe that this does not show an active aggression "against" education, but there is an exclusion of education policy makers, for a matter that is in the education field. Idealism is a good property, however, idealism must recognize that the greater forces are not paying attention to your ideals. They are concerned with politics (governors), business (CEOs), and other leaders (what ever that means). Here is a "Commission on Technology and Adult Learning" and it can not even find a term for AE planners unless it is the very bland "other leaders". I tell you that you will get the respect indicated above until your ideals can be a market for technology. Believe me this repulses me as much as it does you. This is one of the reason that I can not give you a title for my position. Ask Catherine.
Harry Forster
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