Tangent: intellectual detritus

1) Citizenship rhetoric & education (continued): As previously discussed, schools are about creating the next batch of citizens; thinking about that in light of other previous thoughts about immigration, made me start to play the analogy out (something I do lots of; hence my interest in "reframings" and other ways to further inform the debate through tilting it on its side)...does this then make home schooling the equivalent reaction of the xenophobe? (We can't control the larger world, and it's all going to ruin, so we have to "seal the borders" and only deal with taking care of our own.) Is home schooling essentially the paleo-con position? If that's true, is public schooling essentially a neo-con construction? I suppose it could be, or it could be a liberal construction (if education is conceived as creating a new collaborative culture rather than imperially imposing culture upon the next generation--a la the neocons).

2) The rhetoric of NAR takes on media consolidation: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre [media environment] that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in [media diversity] made in the wake of the [the advent of public broadcasting in the US]. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral [intellectual] disarmament." Does saying it that way make my thesis more compelling?

3) Motivation & GEC: In my day job as a marketer, I got a copy of Motivation Strategies, a trade publication about using promotional items to motivate sales teams, etc. I found this interesting:

Including luxury brands in an incentive program can be a great way to dress it up and give participants something to stretch for--believing that if they just work a little harder they might have a shot at earning that high-quality, luxury item. But incentive end-users should also make sure the luxury item fits the demographics and profile of participants.
But don't let your luxury item become the be-all and end-all of your program, says Dana Slockbower, Director of Marketing for Rymax. 'You need to have quality branded products at price points for everyone,' she says. 'Some people will be driven by that aspirational luxury item they can work towards, but others need to feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return.'
It becomes demotivating, in fact, 'to offer rewards that cannot be reached,' says Norma Jean Knollenberg of Top Brands, 'regardless of the brand or the perceived luxury value of the brand.' ("Living in the Lap of Luxury (Brands)", Motivation Strategies, Vol. 11, Issue 4, Fall 2007. p. 22)

So why is this interesting? Not because it's particularly insightful--if one remembers the chapter from high school psychology class, one can probably resurrect that page about the rats in the cage with the electrified floor and learned helplessness. What's interesting is that it's coming from what can only be called "the heart of the GEC beast"--capitalism at its finest, where competition is celebrated, and good citizenship is a PR strategy, not a responsibility (previous issues have talked about how companies perceived as "green" are rising in popularity without any need to address the issue of being green vs. being perceived as green).
Yet even here, there's a recognition that "offering rewards that cannot be reached" can be demotivating. Yet the quintessence of the GEC paradigm is the understanding that education serves the purpose of increasing one's success in the marketplace. It has no "backup plan", no "quality branded products at price points for everyone" for someone who looks around h/erself and doesn't see people succeeding in the marketplace; it has nothing to say to someone who recognizes that h/er job opportunities are limited by factors that have little to do with education. It has only that dream to sell; anyone who doesn't believe is accused of not dreaming hard enough. There is no recognition (in the education policies proposed in the GEC paradigm) that there needs to be a reason to attend school that helps students "feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return."

And nevermind the idea of being first in the world in all subjects and all elements of the global economy is to offer "rewards that cannot be reached", no matter how "luxury" such an idea might seem. From reading articles like this, it seems apparent that even the business community (which educationists are supposed to be falling over themselves to emulate) recognizes that not everyone is the top salesperson; motivation strategies exist to help improve the overall efforts and effects of the sales staff, but not everyone can (or wants to) "achieve at world-class levels". Yet, to point out such a fact in education policy is complete heresy--seen as proof that one recognizes others as categorically inferior, rather than proof that one recognizes the belief that "everyone wants a Rolex" is a categorically inferior belief.

Topic: citizenship rhetoric

OK, as I think about this some more I'm thinking about based on the following thoughts:
1) Lisa Delpit's assertion that schooling (as an institution) is always about "other people's children". The premise inherent in this is that "we can raise our kids right, but we can't trust those people to do it right." (Which ties nicely into my previous post about the trope of threat as a driving force for education--see below.) 2) Especially since we're talking about publicly funded schooling, we're talking about what sort of future citizens are creating?

So my topic is really about what definition of citizenship (i.e., what sort of citizens) are we calling forth in the rhetoric of our education policy?

So what intrigues me about A Nation At Risk, is that it calls forth citizens who are conceived of as contributors to a global economy (or more accurately, contributors to American supremacy in the global economy)--and really little else. This is important in that it marks a move away from rhetorics that define a citizen's duty as more than a taxpayer--from ones that conceive of the duty as a citizen to create social justice, extend democracy, etc.

This is important on one hand because (one of) the inherent premise(s) in NAR's rhetoric, is that the competition in this global economy is fundamentally fair, and it elides any critiques (thereby obviating the citizen's need to address them as well) of the system as a way to maintain economic inequality.

But I think one my most vexing problems is how to help the reader of it (who will presumably be coming from an education background--how many other folks do you suppose will pick up a dissertation about education policy?) will see it as talking about rhetoric (first and foremost), rather than talking about a particular policy, or as an argument for a certain type of citizenship, etc.--since that's what I'm really most interested in.