Topic: latest thinking

Yeah, yeah...so this act of blogging regularly will inspire me to be more productive just isn't quite working out as I had hoped. That said, let's not cry over spilled milk. I attended the Rhetoric Society of America and an interesting session revisiting Dewey vs. Lippmann (in short, it's the debate about the nature of "the public" in a modern age, where Lippmann argues that the modern world is too complex, and people are too busy to take an active interest in everything they need to know as members of the public; therefore a technocratic elite--in Lippmann's world "objective" journalists--would sift through the information, distill it, and then present it, and the public's job would be to get behind those people who they perceive to be the smartest at handling it VS. Dewey's version of New England town meeting writ large, where even if people can't understand the nuances of the farm bill, they can understand the major issues at stake and engage with others in a community to make good decisions...a sort of lots of mini-publics discussing a number of ideas--not necessarily all they need to know or do--and people would be part of many different publics...a sort of interest group democracy).

And it got me thinking about my "question"...I know it revolves around the confluence of the terms "media" "education" and "public" (and probably some form of "hegemony" or "global economic supremacy" etc. set in contradistinction to "democracy" or some similar concept), but is it best expressed as:
1) what is the role of "the media" (a term I recognize to be problematic, but in popular discourse for a reason; therefore used without estrangement quotes hereafter--i.e., I'm not looking to have that conversation now) in [influencing/ creating/ framing] education policy? [Is a concomitant, "what should it be" implied? necessary? And there we get to the question of how big does the question need to be? How small a slice am I looking to carve out so as to be manageable--since obviously that's a problem--yet still large enough to constitute "a contribution to the field"--and absent a defined field of folks engaged in this debate, how does one determine that? But that's another existential crisis for a different post.] Or is it:
2) what role does [and again, could/should] the media play in creating a public who can advocate for education[al change beneficial to democracy and not corporate hegemony]? Or is it:
3) etc. (a.k.a., to be continued)

And I suppose the issue again here is "is 'the question' supposed to perform a 'rhetorical"'function?" That is to say, is it supposed to be a "rhetorical question", the straight man to set up my punchline, of the answer I already know, and the work from proposal onward to be the marshaling of evidence to drive that point home? Or is it more the role of defining an area I believe worth investigating and the work from the proposal forward is to trace the outlines of what's profitable to talk about in that "field" (however constructed)?

I presume it to be the first (especially since that's more manageable), but I'm more intrigued by doing the work of the second--though perhaps that's presumed to be the preliminary work (that I'm supposed to already have completed) to get me to the first. All that said...I think what's interesting about that formulation/musing about the definitional aspect of the "question" is that it reflects the larger question above. That is to say, what I'm really interested in is how does one construct a public capable of talking about these things intelligently? (i.e., since I can't find more people like me to talk to, how do I grow them...or put less arrogantly--how do I get people to understand me, for it's in that act of dialogue that we come to a shared set of frames/common language/mutual understanding that is also associated with "community" "democracy" "the unforced force of discourse" or whathaveyou.)

So the problem that needs sense made of it, that we need to get smarter about, etc., is (in this iteration)...how do we get people to view the purpose of education (more) as the induction of the young into democratic practice, limited hierarchy, and/or social justice? [I am, of course, presuming here that I don't need to argue that as a value set worth espousing--though obviously it's contestable, otherwise it wouldn't be a condition we would have to work to obtain--and that points out that I don't think that it's necessary to show that we need more of it. Is that an unreasonable assumption? Isn't that the challenge of being an academic? One has to (be ready to) question every assumption?]

So the answer I would pose would be to say "through presentations of education (and educational policy issues) in the media". Why?:
1) Current depictions are exceedingly focused on hierarchy (either as meritocracy, or as [unintentional? does it matter?] neoliberal worldview)
2) most people's interaction with education [policy] comes through the media (warranted assertion? acceptable as axiomatic? I'd say yes.)
2b) I'd say this about that point: people have limited knowledge of what actually goes on in schools...their conceptions are informed by their experience as students (however long ago that was), and descriptions of it in the media (which fall into two major types [is it even a question of major vs. minor? Are there any "minor" types?]: narratives about the heroic teacher struggling against the odds (one of which is always an uncaring bureaucracy) to touch the hearts of h/er students, who repay h/er efforts with learning and love, and the other type--the broadside against the institution in general as bloated, uncaring, overly afraid of lawsuits [and consequently irrational], that churns out students unprepared for anything.) [Anybody wanna argue with that?]
3) these depictions make it easy to withdraw support from schools because they're presented as fundamentally broken (because all depictions show systemic failures--all successes come in spite of the system, rather than because of it--even depictions of successful interventions (e.g., some curricular innovation or some new intervention program tried within a given school)--present it as the work of dedicated teachers, parents, or staff members, who fought to make it happen, and are worried that it won't continue to receive funding, etc. In other words, even though it's pitched as an attempt to highlight systemic interventions, the fear that the intervention won't be able to get up to scale undercuts the idea that any systemic change can work.