Imperatives and Alibis: Fascism and the Rhetoric of Educational Innovation

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/imperatives-and-alibis-fascism-and-the-rhetoric-of-educational-innovation/

It’s not every day you read an article comparing an education pedagogy to fascism.

The article opens with an example of a UK school that has retrofitted most of its traditional library space into a flexible learning environment where students were given access to a variety of connected devices and could configure the space for group work. While all students had access to the devices during assigned individual study, the collaborative work was limited to “struggling students.”

The first criticism the author aims at this system is the idea that these learner-based systems are only necessary to catch students up so they be integrated into a traditional, test-performance based system.

The second is that the school only allocated relatively young teachers to the task, unwilling to risk more experienced teachers for the experiment they were trying with struggling students. The library was effectively more about the flash of technology than in using that technology to help students learn.

The author’s comparison to fascism is specifically in relation to an education reform under fascist Italy, the “Riforma Gentile” of 1923. The author draws on criticism of the reform from the then-political prisoner Antonio Gramsci, who believed the system to be too utopian in scope; an education platform that did not account for socio-historical factors. It created a divide among students, pushing a small few to become “masters of their own thinking,” leaving the rest to inferior and rigid vocational training.

Although the author is not equating the policies of today with fascist Italy, he does suggest some similarities, namely a hegemonic undertone that resists criticism. He suggests a tendency to look at educational successes uncritically, ignoring their frequent socio-economic advantages when applying the same criteria on everyone else.

He moves on to say that technology or innovation are often used as “smoke and mirrors,” a guise in which to present the school in a positive light, while leaning towards an increasingly rigid and uniform teaching system. The addition of things like parental choice further exacerbate this, with incentives for struggling schools to model themselves after successful ones, disregarding their socio-economic differences.

The author points to a central tenet, the idea that educational performance equals economic performance, as the core of the problem; the idea that the output you get from schools is a direct correlation on their future success, driving a push to constantly monitor and compare students, to highly regulate the curriculm, and emphasize tests. With market-based systems being pushed, conformity is encouraged, further stagnating schools. The author’s initial example demonstrates perhaps the worst of this effort, the pushing of already marginalized students into the afterthought, separated from the core educational system that the school is actually judged upon.

I think the article touches on one of the hardest parts of dealing with education reform, the actual logistics. The school had the money to reform their library into a new and interesting learning environment that emphasises group work and constant internet access, but in practice is unable to put anything more than already struggling students behind this system for fear of doing poorly on standardized tests. When a direct correlation between test performance and future economic potential is assumed, it leads to narrow discussion on how to best serve students.