The good (effective) life.
The subtle shaping of educational ideologies.
The distance between the teachers and the accountability apparatus has all but collapsed, fabricating a new kind of teacher, whose value is oriented to markets, management, and numerical performance indicators - Jessica Holloway and Jory Brass
I caught up with a teacher friend of mine recently over the school holidays and - as often happens amongst teachers - we began chatting about what we had achieved during our time away from the whiteboard.
Did you notice the key word there?
Achieved.
During our conversations it really stood out for us that we as teachers - who are often the subject of criticism by other fields for their lengthy school breaks - tend to judge the “success” of our holidays in terms of our ability to achieve the KPIs we set for ourselves over the break.
How many jobs were we able to tick off?
Did we go on enough family adventures?
How much time did we set aside for ourselves and our own individual projects?
My friend and I began reflecting on the desire for a measurable outcome with which to determine the quality of our holidays, which caught me for a minute.
Then it kept bugging me.
The good (effective) life.
Schools are cultural shaping institutions.
They do not simply pass on knowledge and skills but profoundly shape, and contribute to, our understanding of the world and what it means to exist within it.
There has been a groundswell of work over a number of decades seeking to improve the efficiency of schooling and teaching. Predominantly, such work in Australia has been interested in improving teacher effectiveness for student achievement within limited areas of the curriculum (literacy and numeracy). With this desire comes a growing push for more standards, targets and achievements.
The idea that education and teaching ought to be effective and efficient is not “common sense” but an ideological belief, assuming that such “progress” in education would result in the desirable social world we seek.
Such ideological perspectives of education don’t simply stay within the gates of the school grounds.
They are formational.
Being a quality human.
In the current age of accountability teachers are constantly bombarded with external judgments of their quality spoken over them.
Arguably as a result of the global education reform movement (GERM), the “quality” teacher has become largely constructed as one that contributes to measurable growth in a narrow selection of educational outcomes based upon standardised tests.
Whereas in another time and place being considered a “quality teacher” might have looked starkly different, teachers are increasingly perceiving the quality of their practice upon these narrow measures of effectiveness and efficiency.
In a profession that often blurs the life/work divide, should we be surprised when ideologies of effectiveness and efficiency begin to permeate into the daily lives of teachers?
By no means are such impacts upon teachers simply a result of schooling structures and the way we understand education but also reflections of a broader narrative that society presents as to what it means to live the “good life”.
This raises the question as to whether our educational institutions should simply conform to dominant societal narratives, or whether they ought to push back against such desires.
Alternative visions.
It is my argument here that ideologies of effectiveness and efficiency do not simply inform the structure of schooling, teaching and learning.
They contribute to our understanding of what it means to have a successful life.
i.e.
Life hacks.
Hustle.
Rack up the numbers.
Get it done.
Most profit, least cost.
Although such values are reflective of daily life in many Western societies, we can see how they can become further entrenched as schooling and education conform to such visions.
Don’t get me wrong, productivity can be a very healthy thing. However, when such ideas saturate our way of seeing the world and our place in it, we may miss something.
Worse still, we may exude a deep-seated arrogance where we find ourselves meeting or exceeding the KPIs of such a worldview over others.
Changing the narrative.
Like in education, there exist alternative ways of understanding success in life. We may even find that certain ways of being, though ineffective for achievement, may be the most valuable when it comes to the “good life”.
It is quite clear that there is a lot left to do in Australian education. Yet, external pressures placed upon teachers by society to become machines of effectiveness are not solving the problems we currently face.
Education does not simply need to reflect society as it is but presents an opportunity to reflect on such ways of being and whether these in fact are in our best interest of our students, teachers and broader communities.
A critical examination of the ideologies informing the purpose of schooling and education might be the first step towards getting there.
Till next time,
