QuixoteÕs Science: public heresy/private apostasy
Paul Dowling
School of Culture Language & Communication
Institute of Education
University of London
At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, ÒFortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.Ó (Miguel de Cervantes[1])
El Don
Quixote was right,
of course; windmills in CervantesÕ Europe were monstrous giants, though wrong
(as he eventually discovered) in his chivalrous crusade. If the enhanced
performance of this new technology over hand milling didnÕt persuade the locals
to pay the millerÕs fee or tithe, then the destruction of their querns by or on
behalf of the wealthy mill ownersÑlocal lords or the churchÑwould chivvy them
into the new era.[2] Did the
introduction of windmills change peopleÕs lives? Even this brief account points
in the direction of a division of labour.[3]
There are entrepreneurs, shall we say (the owners of the mill), there are
millrights (employed by the entrepreneur), there is the miller, and there are
producers of grain, there are the henchmen who take a hammer to household
handmills in a kind of Luddism in reverse. The nature of the millrightÕs skills
had been developing for half a millennium before Quixote took exception to
them, but, essentially, all of these positions were in place, mutatis
mutandis, before
the building of the first mill. The appearance of the giant on the landscape
signaled an enhancement in the organization of this division of labour that
effected a movement in the demarcation of the public and the private; the
deterritorialization of domestic flour production and its reterritorialization
as a publicly available (at a cost) service.[4]
So, peopleÕs lives changed, but the change constituted and was constituted by a
developing sophistication in the division of labour of which the windmill stood
as a material sedimentation. QuixoteÕs error was in mistaking a signifier for
the social organization that it signaled and his lance would never have been a
match for either.
This,
essentially, was the line of argument that I offered in Dowling (1991a),
although in that essay I was concerned not with Ôthe windmillÕ, but with Ôthe
computerÕ and, more than a decade later, I might want to replace the latter by
Ôthe internetÕ which, of course, I can access via my mobile phone or my TV as
well as my Powerbook and which can be imagined as a very visible sedimentation
of the globalised division of labour. That is to say, I am conceiving of technology as a regularity of practice; the
kind of regularity that enables us to recognize the internet as such. This
regularity is emergent upon the formation of diverse oppositions and alliances
that we can think of as social action and that carries on at all levels of
analysis from state activity down to the strategies and tactics of individual
players.
A
curriculum is a technology. It exists in at least two forms, an official or
general form and its realization in local instances (cf Bernstein, 1996). A
technological determinist kind of argument might conceive of the local
curriculum in its enactments in classrooms and lecture theatres as only
relatively autonomous with respect to the official form. In this conception,
emphasis would be placed on the effects on local practices of changes in the
official form as well as, perhaps, the nature of and limitations upon the
autonomy of the classroom. Consider, though, the push for modern or new
mathematics in many parts of the world in the 1960s (see Cooper, 1983, 1985;
Moon, 1986; Dowling, 1990). Here, the crucial bourbakiist message was
ultimately dissipated as the central organizing language of set theory was recontextualised
as a pedagogic resource in the primary classroom (hoops and chalk circles for
organizing objects) and as merely another topic on the secondary curriculum.
The strong classification in the division of labour between mathematicians and
school mathematics teachers survived quite intact the intervention of the
former in the activities of the latter.
Similarly,
being required (by quality assurance scrutineers) to provide explicit lists of
intended learning outcomes for postgraduate seminars results merely in the
production of an official local curriculum and has little impact on the local
local curriculum in which the professor is established as author rather than
relayer of knowledge, albeit within a tradition of discourse, a discipline,
perhaps. Here, the division of labour closely associates the person of the
professor with the institutionalised practice of the discipline so that they
may claim what I refer to (after Weber (1964), mutatis mutandis) as traditional authority. This mode of authority
action is most likely to be effective under conditions of relative stability.
Thus In a period of healthy supply of mathematics graduates, those appointing
mathematics teachers are in a position to stipulate that a degree in
mathematics is a requirement for a successful application. Such a stipulation
brings together a particular category of person and a particular technology
(the mathematics curriculum) in authorizing its appointee who may, of course,
teach mathematics, but not science, which is the exclusive territory of
graduates in that field. But, as an ÔexpertÕ, the qualified mathematics teacher
may claim a degree of authority over the mathematics curriculum giving rise to
the dominance of the local over the official, the private over the public.[5]
In 1970s London the supply of mathematics graduates wanting to enter teaching had fallen below demand to such an extent that the possession of a mathematics degree was more of a rarity than a requirement for a mathematics teacher. Indeed, I was appointed as a teacher of mathematics despite having only a degree in physics and no professional or academic teacher education. I was appointed head of department less than three years later. The crisis continued throughout this and much of the next decade and teachers from all sorts of academic backgrounds found themselves teaching mathematics. As head of department I found myself working with physical education specialists, language teachers and geographers as well as a fair number of fellow natural scientists. Clearly, authorizing strategies had reined back on the specificity of the authorÑthe teacher. However, many schools in London began adopting a student-centred scheme of school mathematics called SMILE.[6] This was a workcard-based scheme that had been designed specifically in response to the shortage of specialist mathematics teachers. That which was principally demanded of the teacher was skill in classroom management and administration. In addition, local meetings at which workcards would be revised and new cards produced would also function as in-service training for the teachers. The effect was the constitution of an official curriculum over which individual teachers may be disinclined to claim individual authority. Rather, their role would be, to a substantial extent, defined by the technology so that the authority would reside in the role or practice rather than in the person. I refer to this as bureaucratic authority (again recontextualising Weber). Naturally, with the weakening of the autonomy of the teacher, this mode of authority action is likely to be associated with an assertion (or reassertion) of the dominance of the official over the local, the public over the private.
Now in a more recent paper (Dowling, 2001a) I offered some examples of current trends in the development in the division of labour that entail the production of disembodied analogues of competence in what I am referring to as technologies. The unification and codification of school curricula in England and Wales (see Dowling & Noss, 1990; Flude & Hammer, 1989) and the development of national qualifications frameworks here and elsewhere are examples as are spellcheckers and other software developments such as Adobe Creative Studio which (amongst a great deal more) allows meÑa sociologist, not a photographerÑto produce quite acceptable digital images from the rather amateur RAW files captured on my Canon 10D. These bureaucratising technologies are emergent upon the weakening of the esoteric control of the traditional expert over the form of institutionalisation of the practices to which they relate. The digital codification of these practices operates rather like the mass media which, as Becker & Wehner (2001) point out, serve as Ôreduction mechanismsÕ, rendering their messages accessible to the public.
What appears to have happened is not that technologies have been invented that are able to achieve thisÑthe technologies still have to be acceptable to their audiencesÑbut that changes in the division of labour have effected a shift in the mode of relationship between (certain) categories of traditional ÔexpertÕ and their audiences. With the ÔexpertÕ exercising traditional authority, this relationship is what I refer to as pedagogic (Dowling, 2001a). This means that the author in an interaction retains, or seeks to retain, control over the principles of evaluation of their utterance. The kind of change that I am describing here gestates as this mode of authority becomes increasingly non-viable and the ÔexpertÕ is increasingly held to account for their actions. The relationship takes on more of the character of an exchange mode (ibid.) whereby the principles of evaluation are devolved to the audience. The bureaucratic technology that facilitates this, through its Ôreduction mechanisms,Õ signifies the presence in the division of labour of a mediating or competing authority: the state, in the case of curricula and qualifications frameworks; software houses etc in the case of spellcheckers. The significance of such developments is that to some extent (perhaps to an increasing extent) the voice of the expert may be heard only in terms of the public forms of their practice that are codified in and by the technology; I will return to this in the closing of this essay.
In the UK, the change in the field of education was signalled when, in 1962, the then Minister of Education referred to the school curriculum as a Ôsecret gardenÕ (see Kogan, 1978). The invasion of this garden by politicians and capital over the ensuing forty years established the curriculum as a national park. The mathematical region of this park has been discussed in Dowling & Noss (1990).[7] However, with corresponding public spaces opening up in other national systems and being freely available on the internet, the impact of each national governmentÕs policies becomes comparable in terms of a further ÔreducedÕ, international curriculum. A key representative of this technology is to be found in the series of comparative Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) carried out under the auspices of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) (see http://www.iea.nl/iea/hq/, also http://timss.bc.edu/ and http://nces.ed.gov/timss/). The results of this study and diverse reflections on the performances of participating nations[8] are available globally for recruitment in struggles relating to the bureaucratising of education at national level. This is how it is put on the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) website:
With the emergence and growth of the global economy, policymakers and educators have turned to international comparisons to assess how well national systems of education are performing. These comparisons shed light on a host of policy issues, from access to education and equity of resources to the quality of school outputs. They provide policymakers with benchmarks to assess their systems' performances, and to identify potential strategies to improve student achievement and system outputs. (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/IntlIndicators/)
Given the trend towards the globalising of English (see Crystal, 2003), what we have in this technology is a globally visible public educational discourse.
The first point to note about this discourse is that its subject focus establishes mathematics and science as the global public face of schooling, relegating most other areas to a relatively private sphere. It is easy to see why this is bound to be the case. As the exponents of ethnomathematics and ethnoscience have been energetic in pointing out, mathematical and scientific knowledge has long been appropriated by the dominant and self-styled ÔdevelopedÕ nations as their own. At the same time, most other areas of school knowledgeÑsuch as history and artÑare closely and enthusiastically allied with individual national identities. A study entitled, Trends in International Poetry and Painting would present engaging methodological as well as political problems and Trends in International History would certainly provoke belligerent uproar. Comparative literacy rates are clearly of political interest (see, for example, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), http://www.iea.nl/iea/hq/, also an IEA study), but they do not (and, at the moment could not) specify the language (what with English, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese all legitimately vying for global hegemony). Perhaps sport comes closest to exhibiting the global status of (western) mathematics and science, but really only at the level of elite performance which is clearly not the primary concern of formal schooling.
This observation is consistent with, at the global level, a public curricular sphere consisting of mathematics and science in which context other curricular areas are relegated to a national, which is to say comparatively private sphere; there is an important exception to this division to which I will return later. Stanley Fish localises in time and place the hegemony of science:
... in our culture science is usually thought to have the job of describing reality as it really is; but its possession of that franchise, which it wrested away from religion, is a historical achievement not a natural right. (Fish, 1995; p. 72)
Now I do not subscribe to a theory of natural rightsÑhere, at least, I am a happy (perhaps unhappy) positivist[9]Ñbut I will certainly go along with Fish in understanding western science as a cultural arbitrary.[10] This particular cultural arbitrary, however, is now constituted as one key element in a global hegemony. Furthermore, the contrast in modes of authority that are deployed by religious and scientific practices, respectively, is also consistent with the public ownership of the latter at the expense of the relative privatising of the former. Specifically, religious practices commonly involve the development of a traditional priesthood in on form or another. The developments in science and mathematics curricula that I am referring to here, on the other hand, facilitate bureaucratic authority which tend to render individuals interchangeable: we can all be scientists to the extent that we can have public access to the principles of evaluation of scientific texts; but only a Catholic priest may hear a confession.[11]
Rather than tilt at my
windmill, I want to explore it further to determine just what kinds of relationships
(between author and audience) and practices it privileges. As my empirical
object I shall take the US government TIMSS website at http://nces.ed.gov/timss/ (see Figure 1). I have no space for a detailed
analysis of this site. Rather, I shall use aspects of it to illustrate the
points that I want to make. Firstly, concerning the form of the technology,
this is fairly conventional hypertext site, so that each page consists of a set
of common elementsÑa standard header, a menu to the left (including links to
the parent NCES site), page-specific text (which may or may not contain links)
to the right, below all of this are plain text links to the NCES site, and
above are links to a site map, the US Department of Education site, the NCES
site, and a search engine. The righthand section of the home page contains a
graphic link (a cartoon frog) to some of the questions used in TIMSS, ÔFor
Students!Õ Below this are two windows, one showing ÔWhatÕs NewÕ and the other
ÔInternational Fast FactsÕ, the content of which changes when the page is
refreshed, apparently on the basis of a random selection from a file of
ÔfactsÕ.
home.jpg){kind=link}
This design presents,
on each page, the key claims to bureaucratic authorityÑestablished by the links
to other government sites in the page header and footer[12]Ñand
the structure of the siteÑprincipally in the menuÑwhich consistently frames the
page-specific content. On this site the page-specific content is generally
linear, discursive text. In addition, this page-specific content is, in most
cases, marked, which is to say that it carries one or more links. These links
are generally to other pages in the same site or the parent NCES site.[13]
The design conforms to what Michael Joyce (1995) has described as an
ÔexploratoryÕ rather than a ÔconstructiveÕ hypertext. James Sosnoski describes
the difference as follows:
The exploratory (or expository) hypertext is a Ôdelivery or presentational technologyÕ that provides ready access to information. By contrast, constructive hypertexts are Ôanalytic toolsÕ that allow writers to invent and/or map relations among bits of information to suit their own needs. (Sosnowski, 1999; p. 163)
In my terms, the site establishes
pedagogic relations between its author and audience; this is unsurprising, of
course, in a government publication. It is, however, worth pointing out that even were the site to include
multiple links to other, non-governmental sites, this would itself remain a
pedagogic action insofar as it is a privileging of marked over unmarked text;
the TIMSS site asserts a stronger pedagogic claim by additionally retaining
control over the targets of links to marked text. Unmarked text is, of course,
open to interrogationÑany term or terms may be copied into a non-governmental
search engine. However, such alternative readings are privatised by the TIMSS
site. Similarly, the reader may formulate alternative structures for the
siteÑthis is essentially what I am doing here. Again, though, such strategies
are privatised by the pedagogic site which deploys bureaucratic authority
strategies essentially privileges an explicit taxomony and marked text over
contingent organisation and unmarked text. So, the educational technology that
I have been discussing signals (which is to say, is arguably emergent upon) the
establishment of a public/private partitioning of educational discourse that
locates mathematics and science and strongly institutionalised modes of reading
within the public sphere and other areas of knowledge and alternative modes of
reading in the private.
The next question to
be considered relates to the nature of the public mathematical and scientific
knowledge. In order to address this I will click the frog link on the TIMMS
homepage (Figure 1). This takes me to a
page on another site parented by NCES, the ÔStudentsÕ ClassroomÕ (http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/index).
The particular page is titled ÔExplore Your KnowledgeÕ (http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/eyk/index
and see Figure 2). The page gives access to
assessment items from the TIMSS study and also from the Civic Education Study
(CivEd) to which I shall return later. From the page in Figure 2 I select my subject, grade and the number
of questions (5, 10, 15 or 20) and am presented with the required number of
test items; examples of these are shown in Figures 3-12. After making my
selections from the multichoice radio buttons I can click Ôshow me the answersÕ
and my page is replaced with an answers page including a score given as a
percentageÑFigure 13 shows part of an answer
page. Clicking on the globe buttonÑone is given for each itemÑopens a pop-up
window (Figure 14) showing the US national
performance and the international average for the item; buttons in other
country locations on a world map[14]
will replace the US flag and performance with that of the relevant country.
Before proceeding to
look at some items, I will briefly make two preliminary observations based on
the description thus far. Firstly, the provision of the world map and clickable
international comparisons is a good illustration of my point that we are
talking about global public discourse here, even if only in its larval stage.
Secondly, the combination of multichoice radio buttons and definitive ÔcorrectÕ
answers is a particularly effective privatising of alternatives by a strongly
pedagogic technology. The multichoice test item (and the precoded questionnaire
and countless other digitisings) is a technology that is emergent upon a drive
to render all commensurable, all accountable to a public discourse via the
exclusion of the private.
The TIMSS test items
construct scientific and mathematical knowledge in a familiar way, perhaps.
Firstly, they constitute formal modes of expression (see Figure 6) and content (see Figure 7, which invokes a taxonomy) that
represent what I refer to as the esoteric domain (Dowling, 1998) of mathematical or, in these
cases, scientific knowledge. The esoteric domain consists of discourse which is
strongly differentiated from other areas of practice and contrasts with the public
domain which is weakly
differentiated.[15] Thus,
contrasting with Figures 6 and 7, the item in Figure
4 refers to a childrenÕs game using a tin can phoneÑa public domain
setting. The item in Figure 10 also employs
a public domain setting and it is significant to note that the term,
ÔprobabilityÕ is substituted by ÔchanceÕ. This is consistent with my findings
in my analysis of a major British textbook scheme that the theme of probability
was (at least at that time and in that place) very substantially taught within the public domain (Dowling, 1998).
School science and,
especially, mathematics constitute esoteric domains that are strongly
institutionalised. This is to say that scientific and mathematical language are
deployed with a high degree of regulationÑfar more so than in most other areas
of the curriculum. If I may gloss mathematics, as such, as the study of formal
systems, then it is clear why its esoteric domain must be strongly
institutionalised. Science, then, might be thought of as the study of
partially- or to-be-formalised systems and its esoteric domain language emerges
out of (induction) and is projected onto (deduction) the systems that are to be
formalised. Science too, then, is predicated upon a strongly institutionalised
esoteric domain. However, public domain text renders invisible the esoteric
domain structuring that makes a task mathematical or scientific rather than
something else. In the item in Figure 5, the
response, ÔI hope itÕs candyÕ is indeed an observation about the object in the
bag,[16]
but not in the scientific sense which must exclude the subjective. ÔIntensityÕ
has been replaced by ÔbrightnessÕ in the item in Figure
3; which bulb is ÔbrightestÕ may well relate to colour (frequency) as well
as to intensity and so call for a subjective response; again, subjectivity must
be excluded from formal school science. The item in Figure 8 is particularly interesting in that the
most likely public domain responseÑsomeone has been making saladÑis not offered
as an option; there is a sense in which this item might be thought of as
teaching rather than assessing.
Some of the
mathematics test items (Figures 9-12) may be interpreted as tending to
undermine esoteric domain mathematics and science. The Figure 9 item represents a standard teaching
metaphor which may be glossed as Ôa fraction is a piece of cakeÕ. The correct
answer is the first one on offer because both diagrams 1 and 2 conventionally
represent the fraction 
. However, as I have previously pointed out (Dowling, 1990),
this metaphor pedagogically challenges the esoteric domain constitution of a fraction
as a numberÑthat is of 
as a number
between 0 and 1. Thus, if we use diagram 1 in Figure
9 to illustrate the sum 
+
as in Figure 15, then a
perfectly reasonable (though, of course, mathematically incorrect) answer would
be 
. The ÔcorrectÕ response to the item in Figure 11 is the second radio button, 14 m.
However, this appears to discount the width of the car (and its distance from
the building). If the visible side of the car is a little under 2 m from the
building, then a viewpoint 7 m away from the car in line with the rear of the
car and the lefthand end of the building would make the first optionÑ18 mÑa
better answer. The item appears to be testing estimation skills, but the public
domain simulation renders it ambiguous.[17]
The item in Figure 12 appears to be an
esoteric domain text. However, there is a unique answer only if we qualify
ÔrelationÕ with the term ÔlinearÕ. If the nature of the relation is not
specified then there is no limitation on what might replace the question mark
in the table. We may take the reference to a Ômissing numberÕ as indicating
that the relation is between two numerical variables, but, even so, all five
offered answers are equally acceptable, mathematically. Here, it is not the
construction of a public domain setting that has generated the ambiguity, but a
reduction of the complexity of the esoteric domain.[18]
This brief analysis of
ten test items[19] suggests
that mathematics and scienceÑand the difference between them here is not as
great as one might supposeÑare constructed as laboratorised or, shall we say,
laboratorising practices. These laboratorising practices operate on the
phenomenal world in much the same way as a hypertext author operates on text,
which is to say, by marking that which may legitimately be operationalised; the
unmarked, extraneous, subjective regions of the text are methodologically
excluded. In both mathematics/science and hyptertext, this marking may often be
invisible. In hypertext, however, we are well practiced in scanning the text
with the cursor so as to reveal the links; no similar divining rods are to be
found in mathematics or science and that is why, of course, my revealing of the
ambiguities introduced by the public domain contexts does not challenge the
items as suitable for their purpose.
So my point is not to
criticise the validity or reliability of the test items, but to illustrate the
kind of practice that hegemonises the global public educational discourse. To
the extent that mathematics and science exhaust this discourse, then we might
infer that they define, firstly, the legitimate mode of relationship to the
empirical and, secondly, the legitimate form of argumentation. In both cases,
legitimacy is established by principles of exclusion that are governed by the
esoteric domains of mathematical and scientific practice that exclude, in
particular, the subjective and the contingent thus relegating them to the
private sphere. As I have suggested above, we may tentatively distinguish
between the two esoteric domains by referring to science as a formalising
discourse and mathematics as a formalised discourse.[20]
Given this distinction, we might speculate that science takes the dominant role
in respect of the constitution of the first legitimate mode and mathematics in
respect of the second. The blurring of the distinction between mathematics and
science in their high school forms also blurs this division of discursive
labour. In any event, mathematics and science taken together do seem to define
the legitimate form of rational action so defining, on a global stage, the
bureaucratic public voice,[21]
so IÕll refer to the public global technology as mathematicoscience. Now, clearly, mathematicoscience is not the
only public forms of discourse. However, apart from the operational matrix[22]
of the internet itself, it is arguably the principal form of discourse for
which globalised regularity or institutionalisation might be claimed and this
is signified by its prominence in the global curricular technology to which I
have been referring. Insofar as there is a globally prevalent aspiration for
universal schooling and insofar as mathematicoscience, more or less as I have
described it here, territorialises the globally public content of schooling,
the significance of this discourse should not be understated.
So what are the
implications? Well we might begin by considering this essay. I am certainly
laying claim to both bureaucratic and traditional authority. My affiliation to
the Institute of Education, University of London establishes that I hold an
office that authorises me to speak academically about educational matters. This
is a very weak claim, however, as the practice of peer review (or clubbing,
as I tend to think of it), for example,
ensures that the ex officio authority of academics is limited, generally to that which they may hold
over their students. My recruitment of what I may hope is a familiar academic
style and terms also constitutes a bureaucratic action in the way that I (pace
Max Weber) have defined it: I
am, in this sense, allowing (or pretending to allow) the discourse to
ventriloquise me. Traditional authority is claimed in terms of my yellowing PhD
thesis (which IÕll mention here in case it doesnÕt get into the Ôabout the
authorsÕ summaryÑbut only to make the point ;-)) and also through the community
of celebrated academic authors to which I affiliate via my egocentric
bibliography (clubbing in the imaginary, perhaps). But I am clearly trying to
do more than that. Bureaucratic and traditional authority strategies both
invoke institutionalised, which is to say, stabilised practices. Such
strategies are appropriate in the context of schooling insofar as the authority
of the teacher or of the curriculum rests on a training or on a construction
that has already been completed. In this respect, at least, schooling is
structurally conservative as is illustrated by the recontextualising of set
theory which I mentioned earlier.
The authority of the
academic, on the other hand, is established dynamically. The output of research
is valued only insofar as it is original (a necessary, but, of course, not
sufficient condition for acceptability). Academic discourse, then is
structurally dynamic. The academic may rely on traditional authority strategies
by, for example, establishing originality only in terms of the empirical
setting and not in terms of theoretical frameworkÑreplication studies would be
of this form. However, work of the highest status must contribute to the
development, the construction and/or discovery of the language of the
discourse, which is to say, theory.[23]
This, of course, entails a destabilising of the institutionalised practice that
affirms the two modes of authority action that I have introduced. I need a
third mode. This has, fortuitously, also been provided by Max Weber (1964). As
with the first two modes, I shall retain his term, but redefine the category: charismatic
authority is predicated on the
closure of the category of author and the opening of the category of practice.
In establishing the originality of this essay I am at least in some respects
attempting to deploy a charismatic authority action. I am served in this
respect by the facility to refer to my own previous publications, establishing
myself as an author of already accepted (and so publicly acknowledged as
original) practice.
Naturally, there is a
general level of resistance in the field to charismatic claims to originality
because they must stand in competition with others. My essay, then, must
extend, even distort and transform the discourse, but I do not have free
license. So how might my essay be challenged? Well, on precisely the principles
that are established in the terms of the public global discourse that I am
referring to as mathematicoscience, that is to say: have I deployed appropriate
principles of exclusion in my engagement with the empirical and in the
construction of my syllogisms, have I deployed an objective methodological
apparatus with sufficient rigour to exclude subjective noise or distortion. My
critic may point out, for example, that my sampling strategies are inadequate
to my grandiose claims and that my analysis and argument are tendentious.
Within the context of the public global discourse of mathematicoscience my
critic would be entirely justified as I will authoritatively affirm as the
co-author of a work on research methodology (Brown & Dowling, 1998).
Insofar as my essay is recognisable in the public sphere, it can be recognised
only as heresy.[24]
It is the thrust of my
argument, however, that the lance of my quixotic critic cannot penetrate me,
precisely because it misses the point, which is as follows. All
technologiesÑincluding mathematicoscienceÑare here being regarded as emergent
upon the formation of alliances and oppositions in social action; they are the
public visibility of these alliances. However we know from our respective
experiences that the work that goes into social action is very substantially
conducted in private (perhaps I should buy the editors of this volume a
drink-or invite them to present papers at my institution). Furthermore, the opening
up of private spaces to public scrutinyÑethnography, perhaps, or the ungendered
toilets in Ally McBeal and
the Belgo restaurant in LondonÕs West EndÑwill simply resituate the private,
not eradicate it,[25]
just as the zero-tolerance policing paving the way for the gentrification of
London's Kings Cross produces assaults on happless students in Bloomsbury. The
private, in other words, is for the most part where, for good or bad, things
get done.
Let me complete my
schema for authority strategies. I have, in effect, introduced two variables,
the category of author and the field of practice and each of these are binary
nominal scales, open/closed. The product of these two variables gives rise to
the space in Figure 16. It will be apparent
that there are now four modes of action, three of which have already been
introduced. The fourth mode, which I have termed liberal, is essentially a mode of action in which
authority is negated. In liberal mode, persons are interchangeable and practice
is mutable. PiagetÕs paradise, perhaps, but a mode of action that does seem to
characterise the licence of a private audience: unless you intend or
are required to respond to this essay in public, then there are no necessary
constraints on the way in which you read and make use of it (or choose not to).
The essay stands as a resource or reservoir of resources for recruitment by the
audience and, in this aspect, the relationship between author and audience is
one of exchange. But I will conclude the essay by offering some
suggestions.
This essay is written for an international collection which is managed by
an international editorial group. Those of us submitting chapters will also be
submitting to a peer review process and facing the threat of required revision
or exclusion. The structure of this practice would appear to militate for some
level of adherence to a public discourse which will include, as in this
sentence, the genuflections of hedging, because the authority of our utterances
must reside, bureaucratically, with the discourse our mastery of which is yet
to be finally affirmed. [Please
take a well-earned breath.] To read my analysis of the TIMSS test items as
literal criticism within the field of the assessment of school science and
mathematics would be to elevate the essay to the level of this public
discourse. This would be to render it legitimately open to revision in respect
of the necessary exclusion of subjectivity and, incidentally, tricky language
which can only be obscuring the clarity (or fallaciousness) of its syllogisms.
Interaction in this mode is equilibration[26] and, in this
mode, an acceptable piece of work must contribute or potentially contribute to
the coherence of public rationality to which it stands in synecdochic relation.
But if my overall analysis is persuasive (for whatever reason) then, as private
intellectuals and teachers, we may be sharpening the sword of our own
executioner.
Academic engagement does not always work like this. In the club mode of
peer review (including the audiencing of papers at conferences and the
recruitment of Ôthe literatureÕ in our own papers) we may also be familiar with
the facility to read or listen politely and with at least apparent interest and
to withhold equilibrating action on the grounds that contingency insulates us
from the other author. I call this mode the exchange of narratives. Its
inspirational metaphor comes from the telling of stories in a group of holiday
friends at a bar in Mombassa (don't
ever tell them what they're doing, sociologists are personae non grata in bars). Each narrative stands
in relation of contiguityÑmetonymyÑto the next. But as an audience this is at
best voyeurism (onanism); it passes the time and avoids confrontation.
But the public discourse will not go away. Perhaps the arbitrary nature of
public discourses may be made more apparent (or perhaps not) by the
introduction of the third set of test items that is made available by clicking
the frog on the TIMSS USA website. Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, this set
of items is from the Civic Education Study (CivEd). The CivEd homepage notes
that:
All societies have a continuing interest in the ways in which their young people are prepared for citizenship and learn to take part in public affairs. At the turn of this new century this has become a matter of increased importance not only in societies striving to establish or reestablish democratic governments, but also in societies with continuous and long established democratic traditions. (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/cived/)
Here is not the place (and I will not be allowed the space) to produce even
a brief analysis of the CivEd text items. However, the ÔInternational Fast
FactsÕ box in the screen shot of the TIMSS USA home page that I have presented
as Figure 1 presents what is presumably
a finding from the study:
In 1999, about
90% of 9th-grade U.S. students reported that it is good for democracy
when everyone has the right to express opinions freely.
Year of the
Data: 1999[27]
It would appear that the discourse of liberal democracy is a second key
component of the public global technology alongside mathematicoscience. Jean
Baudrillard (talking about Saddam Hussain and the first Gulf ÔWarÕ) offers a
rather different take on democracy:
... as with every true dictator, the ultimate end of politics, carefully masked elsewhere by the effects of democracy, is to maintain control of one's own people by any means, including terror.' (Baudrillard, 1995; p. 72)
ItÕs not altogether certain that the masking is everywhere very
substantial.
Again, here is not the place to engage in an explicit critiqueÑwhich would,
in any event, be quixotic, a quixocritiqueÑof liberal democracy as a universal
aspiration and absolute good. All that I should do here is to point to the
alignment of discourses associated with the TIMSS site. Alan Sokal (see note
24) would (should he consider an assault on this little piece to be worth the
effort) no doubt berate me for making anything at all out of the juxtaposition
of the language of democracy with the language of scientific rationality other
than that, perhaps, they are in fact properly aligned; the
one seeking the optimizing of the exigencies of social organization in the
context of liberal values, the other seeking the optimizing of our engagement
with the empirical world in the face of imperfect knowledge. I am easily
defeated in the public discourse that emerges out of social alliances that must
overwhelm me. Indeed, even SokalÕs far more celebrated public victims must
often appear to be skulking back into the privacy of their arcane, alchemic
worlds in the face of his dazzling crusade.
The invoking or the awareness of a public/private duality seems to provoke
hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, metaphorical action, but to engage in this way
is either to play the game of the dominant alliances or to falter. To the
extent that the bureaucratized public technology constitutes the language by
which expertise is defined, the traditional expertÑinsofar as their expertise
stands in excess of the bureaucratically defined practiceÑor the charismatic or
liberal innovator may participate only as heretics; and heretics always get
burned eventually (in this world
or a next).
I have introduced three modes of interaction: synecdochic equilibration; metonymic exchange
of narratives; and metaphoric hegemony. The first
two of these modes presume an alliance of similarsÑwe all speak the same public
language. They differ in that equilibration seeks a discursive closure whilst
the exchange of narratives deploys contingency to avoid closure. Hegemony
contrasts with both in recognition of the public/private partition. Here
engagement is between disimilars. But like equilibration, the target is
discursive closure. The product of the two variables, alliance
(similars/disimilars) and target of discursive action (closure/openness) gives
rise to the space shown in Figure 17. As
with my analysis of authority action, I am left with a residual category. In
this case, the category, pastiche, defines an
interaction between disimilarsÑpublic/privateÑunder conditions of discursive
openness. I have offered corresponding tropes for the other modes. The
characteristic trope for pastiche is catachresis (see Burbules, nd). I want to
suggest that it is precisely in this mode that private action in
non-bureaucratic mode is most productively elaborated. Here, apostasy in
relation to the global public technology of mathematicoscience (and democracy)
may be sustained whilst still recruiting from it that which may be of practical
value in our local pursuits. We have, in other words, to recognize, that very
few of us are going to change the world in any sense at all and that those of
us who do may well not welcome the outcome: some people change the world, but
not in ways that they themselves choose.
So what does this mean in the context of mathematics and science education?
I ought, in righteous exchange mode, to say, ÔI donÕt know,Õ but then, IÕm a
teacher. I suppose that it may well come down to paying close attention to the
matter at hand and, in particular, to the nature of the local relations that
will tend to dominate any given intervention or interaction. Very little will
be served, I think, either by total submission to the hegemony of
mathematicoscience or by opposition in quixocritique. The whole point of
pastiche interaction is that the integrity of the participating discourses must
be maintainedÑcatachresis must not be permitted to degenerate into metaphor or,
perhaps worse, the literal discursive identity of equilibration or exchange of
narratives. As has been demonstrated by a wealth of sociological and
sociolinguistic work,[28]
the predisposition to accept public forms of discourse is itself emergent upon
structuration that can be described in socioeconomic terms. As I have
demonstrated elsewhere (in relation to school mathematics at least), public
forms of discourse necessarily serve to recontextualise and transform and so
subordinate private forms where the latter are introduced into the public
domains of the former (Dowling, 1991b, 1995, 1996, 1998, 2001a). As the
bureaucratized spokesperson of mathematicoscience the teacher may draw their
students into their own game, but they will not solve any of the problems,
address any of the concerns of their students insofar as these problems and
concerns are constituted within localized, private discourses and one suspects
that most of them are. Essentially, school is a very bad place to learn
anything beyond how to survive as a school student (or teacher).[29]
Yet, knowing all of this, my erstwhile[30]
mentor, Basil Bernstein had this to say in 1974:
It is an
accepted educational principle that we should work with what the child can
offer: why donÕt we practice it? The introduction of the child to the
universalistic meanings of public forms of thought is not compensatory
educationÑit is education. (Bernstein, 1974, p. 199)
Thirty years and two Gulf ÔwarsÕ on, youÕd think weÕd know better. But I
fear not; viva el Don, it seems.
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