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my dissertation was on education clauses in state constitutions + the history of school finance litigation, but i became disenchanted w/ that topic bc:
a) nearly everyone involved w/ that "work" had an obv agenda (fund/defund the schools)
b) the schools have always been "failing"
a) nearly everyone involved w/ that "work" had an obv agenda (fund/defund the schools)
b) the schools have always been "failing"
b) was by far the more fascinating of the two. almost since schooling began in the us, it has been decried by outside observers, even as it was hailed as "essential" or in need of reform. and nearly every reform - centralizing, decentralizing, testing, no testing - has "failed"
it was a subject that seemed amenable to no answers, just endless kvetching about having more of this and less of that. and, with the rise of "social science" data, any specific method or use of money could be revealed as unhelpful for "student outcomes." nothing worked
in spite of that, some kids "learned" anyway, which gave the koch-right a fairly foolproof "nothing matters except the parents" argument, which was inarguable but also not worthy of argument, since the point was to move students past that
eventually i read j ranciere's "the ignorant schoolmaster" and concluded that was the answer: "universal teaching was not a method for instructing the people; it was a benefit to be announced to the poor; they could do everything any man could. It sufficed only to announce it"
so, in my own classes, i began giving only "A" grades and quite deliberately tried to demonstrate that I was "emancipated" from "enforced stultification." this went over poorly with my bosses, yet I became more outspoken about this and more contemptuous of other methods
then i argued, as in this piece for @MUGGER1955 , that we should stop all grading. but i began to go further: i argued that, if we truly cared, we'd end higher education as we knew it. this can't happen, though many schools *will* soon close https://www.splicetoday.com/on-campus/stop-grading-and-testing
my position then was simple, and it remains the same now: the only useful learning I did occurred during the six years I was home schooled and left entirely to my own devices. if the goal was to make people realize "what one man can do, another can do," that was the way
my journey through the university, then, was like a shedding of skin: i had to return to my roots. e.g., my father discoursing about bluto in drag in a popeye cartoon at 5p.m. on a saturday was more revealing than two decades of gender studies reading/research.
watching 20 minutes of a fight between mismatched competitors (as in this essay for @MUGGER1955 ) was superior than an entire curriculum built around bourdieu or foucault, at least for my own mind, for my thought processes https://www.splicetoday.com/sports/the-fights-dan-bobish-vs-igor-vovchanchyn